Fedora Torrent seeder plans and future

[Christopher Meng]

This question remain in my inbox for a long time.I just want to throw
my opinion to everyone.
First,we cant suspend this project as there still have users use bt to download.
Second,I prefer to use magnet link rather than provide torrent.Because
I think this way of download has less obstruction during downloading.
Last but not least,you have said,direct download is faster than
torrent many times.So I hope infrastructure team delete the live
torrent and never provide livecd torrent from now.
That's my suggestion.

On 1/21/12, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:
> Greetings.
>
> As some of you may know, we are migrating all of Fedora Infrastructure
> over to RHEL6 from the old existing RHEL5 servers. This allows us to
> offer newer/better services and have faster/better upstream support for
> our services. As part of this migration we have come to our torrent
> server ( torrent.fedoraproject.org ).
>
> We have been able to migrate it to a new RHEL6 instance, but looking at
> a number of factors, we wonder if this might be a good time to retire
> this service.
>
> Problems/Issues/Background:
>
> 1. On the release engineering side, the process of creating and signing
> the torrent checksums, then syncing them to the torrent seed is
> difficult and time consuming. (The torrent seed server can't be in the
> same location as all our other rel-eng resources due to open external
> port requirements).
>
> 2. Torrent usage has been decreasing over time.
>
>    a. median active users per day over the last 800 days has shown
>       a decrease from 528 at the start of the time period to 220 at the
>       end.
>    b. total seeds have remained relatively constant
>        we explain this in that the many clients are consistently seeds
>        for every release - roughly
>    c. the total completed downloads are decreasing.
>
> You can see stats for the rhel6/opentracker instance at:
> http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/stats/
>
> 3. There is not much in the way of open source torrent seed software.
> We have cobbled together a working setup on RHEL6, but it's not
> trivial. Maintenance and updating this setup will continue to be
> difficult over time.
>
> There's a number possible reasons for the decline in usage:
>
> - many providers throttle or block torrent downloads.
> - Our download infrastructure and mirrors system has gotten good enough
>   that direct downloads are usually faster and easier.
> - many sites that made torrents popular are also discontinuing them in
>   favor of other things like magnet links. (see thepiratebay.org).
> - More of our users are downloading RC's or the like directly instead
>   of waiting for release, meaning they don't seed or download the
>   torrents.
>
> Solutions/Suggestions:
>
> 1. Discontinue torrent seeding before F17 alpha.
>
> 2. Discontinue torrent seeding, but generate "official" torrent files
> for download so others in the community could seed if they wished to.
>
> 3. Continue providing a torrent seeder, but set some kind of threshold
> for when we might want to discontinue it down the road.
>
> 4. Publish a magnet link and point to sites like openbittorrent.com as
> a tracker (with direct download also listed).
>
> Thoughts? Questions?
>
> kevin
>


-- 


Best Regards,
Christopher Meng------'Cicku'

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