Monday, March 31, 2003

BitTorrent hits the Big Leagues RedHat made RedHat 9 available to RH network subscribers recently. It won't be available for general download for another week However, it is available for general download via BitTorrent. /. posted a story to just such an effect earlier today. In most circumstances, the SlashDot Effect would have quickly killed the BitTorrent servers. Not so in this case -- because of the way BT is designed, the more participants will result in faster downloads for all. I was speaking with the author of the OS X BT Client about the whole ordeal and he indicated that the current aggregated bandwidth is around 177 megabytes/second across about 3,000 active participants. I'm sure that number has since grown. It will be very interesting to see the final stats for this. Even though I have only a passing interest in RedHat 9 (would have downloaded it eventually), I decided to go ahead and actively download it and will leave my BT client running in upload-only mode long after I have successfully downloaded the images. It is nice to be able to very quickly download something near the moment of release very quickly, free, and with the knowledge that the act of downloading actually contributes to other people being able to access the download in question. Oh, and BT is implemented in Python. The Cocoa client is ObjC. Update: I found the current traffic statistics for the RH9 disk images. As I write this, BitTorrent has moved 3.5 terabytes in just under 8 hours. Currently, the BT "network" is sustaining an aggregated bandwidth of 1.03Gb/s and peaked at around 1.4 Gb/s. Whereas the BitTorrent based network of downloaders is thriving on the load, it appears that is seriously lagging. 8:04:26 PM