[Wishlist]Use BitTorrent to relieve server load for large updates

[CatKiller]

When there is a big update - for example, a new distribution release - the servers have to deal with large traffic. By implementing an (optional?) BitTorrent component to update-manager, the amount of available bandwidth goes up at times of heaviest load.

So the first few people to upgrade will download updates from the server as normal, but then subsequent upgraders will get parts of their packages from them, and so on.

[CatKiller (catkiller)]

Actually, I've just found out about debtorrent and apt-p2p. So other people are working on this problem, and in fact others are attempting to organise users to use one of these protocols for the Intrepid upgrade.

All (!) the update-manager devs need to do, then, is to make it straightforward for a user to use one of these protocols for updates. When the user selects the Peer-to-Peer option, update-manager can grab the required packages and make the necessary changes to sources.list. Since both these protocols fall back to standard http: transfers, this should be pain-free for the user.

Changes to the firewall would be necessary to seed the files, which isn't necessarily something that novice users would be able to do, but even having those users leeching the files from those users who are capable of making firewall changes would still serve to reduce the load on the Ubuntu servers.

Adoption of one or both of these protocols by a high-profile distribution like Ubuntu would aid these projects enormously. It may be necessary to devote some resources initially to these projects to steer them to the level of maturity that would be required for such widespread adoption.

Integration with update-manager would create a useful configuration point to cap upload speeds for a given user. This work would, at a minimum, serve as a useful basis for all deb-based distributions, and the solution of the basic problems would also be useful for rpm-based distributions. It could also form part of any unifying efforts to standardise software distribution in the GNU/Linux community.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Rejecting the u-m upstream task, and opeing and marking triaged/wishlist the u-m Ubuntu task. Although I am not sure of the extent of the changes, this would be something nice to have.

Methinks this would also affect apt & friends, but I will let mvo discuss it.