So you download via Bit Torrent (only legal files of course), but do you share?

I sure do 😛

I was thinking about this the other day because I’ve been helping out providing bandwidth to one of my favorite Linux distros, Sabayon Linux.

I provide a ftp mirror for Sabayon and also a bunch of other smaller distros, but I’ve been interested in testing out how well Bit Torrent works, especially when it’s a release of a semi popular distribution.

Ive found that HTTP/FTP mirrors get hit pretty hard on new releases, its not just pure bandwidth issues, it’s also resources being sucked by broken download clients.

A few months back on of my FTP servers was brought down by a couple of broken download managers, still it was a learning lesson. I’ve switched to a different FTP Daemon and spent a bit of time getting the configuration right to broken clients can’t bring a box down.

Anyway back to my ramblings about Bit Torrent, I seed on LinuxTracker, regular downloaders there might have noticed me from time to time 🙂

During the last Sabayon Linux release that was uploaded to Linux Tracker traffic stats was about 500gb a day for the first week which is fairly impressive. It would take a couple of servers on 100m/bit to push roughly that much a day allowing for peak times.

Obviously downloading a Linux distro via Bit Torrent doesn’t suit everyone, some people are with ISPs who block or throttle P2P, others only have HTTP / FTP access, so there will always be a place for other download methods.

However my experience shows that Bit Torrent has a great place in the download arena, especially for smaller open source projects or distributions to use as a distribution method. It also gives the community a chance to contribute back to the project in some way.

When the next Sabayon Linux release comes around I’ll put together some more stats, until then I’ll keep seeding that Sabayon devel ISOs which are being released as torrent downloads only, purely because of mirror bandwidth and space issues.

Have fun seeding!