[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bittorrent has some very major problems with firewalls and proxies.
>
> I suggest BitTorrent be the primary protocal for files over, say, 200
> MB but alternative protocals should be presented. Perhaps on the
> description page the user could follow a link "Having problems with
> BitTorrent?" and from there there would be a BitTorrent link.

We will most likely find that straightforward use of bittorrent will
scale very poorly for us.

Historically it has been the case that single bittorrent seeding hosts
become CPU bound well before they hit 10mbit/sec transfer. This means
that BT can only achieve high output rates if you throw a lot of CPU
power at it... not a problem when you can count on a lot of seeders,
but if seeding our offered files requires a half TB of storage, not
many will do it.

Of course, things can be done to help this.. like packaging up BT with
tools that allow a central wikimedia page to control the content of
the distributed BT agents.

> Can anyone propose alternate protocols?

HTTP

Lets save the fancy bandwidth savings gymnastics for when there is a
measurable bandwidth issue.

The files at download.wikimedia.org haven't killed us yet, nor will a few DVDs.