2012/6/6 Oren Bochman orenbochman@gmail.com:
Dear Ariel,
Consider that people who would need to use Torrent most of all cannot host a mirrors - this is a situation of the little guy being asked to do the heavy lifting.
It would be saving WMF significant resources, - it would be more efficient than Rsync. Doing this outside the the WMF infrastructure does not make sense (authenticity, automation) and is the reason why use of torrents has failed traditionally. If the WMF does this - it should be possible for users to leverage all the mirrors simultaneously - which is why torrents are the preferred form of transport for Linux distribution.
Installing a torrent server should not significantly impact workload. The main problems, as I see it, is to write a maintenance script to create the magnet link/.torernt files once the dumps are generated and to publish them on the dump servers.
With your blessing - I would try to help with it in the context of say a labs, if it would be integrated into the dump release process.
Actually, the link that Ariel provided contains links to Burnbit, who claim [1] to be using webseeds (i.e. the Wikimedia servers) to provide the torrents with data. So in theory it should be enough to have a script generate a burnbit torrent (or any torrent with webseeds, for that matter) for each dump, which should be well within the reach of an interested user. As to the actual hosting of files, the users will only host the files they choose to seed (presumably, the ones they work with) and nothing more.
Strainu