A Torrent of Updates
Posted on 10 March, 2008 by maximinus
Chalk another one up for BitTorrent. Arstechnica reports that INHOLLAND University's IT department has just ditched 20 of the 24 servers they used to use for rolling out updates - by switching from a traditional client-server model for updates to a BitTorrent-based distribution system.
What used to take four days now takes four hours. Before, the servers would have to handle up to around 22.2TB of updates, to cover all 6,500-odd desktop machines around the campus, with the updates all having to be rolled out to all 24 servers, and then an average of around 271 machines vying for bandwidth to download the updates from each server, it's no wonder it took so long. Thanks to BitTorrent, the few remaining servers need only dish out a few copies, with all the other machines picking up the updates from each other, the servers merely coordinating the efforts.
What used to take four days now takes four hours. Before, the servers would have to handle up to around 22.2TB of updates, to cover all 6,500-odd desktop machines around the campus, with the updates all having to be rolled out to all 24 servers, and then an average of around 271 machines vying for bandwidth to download the updates from each server, it's no wonder it took so long. Thanks to BitTorrent, the few remaining servers need only dish out a few copies, with all the other machines picking up the updates from each other, the servers merely coordinating the efforts.
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