Torrents aren't always well seeded initially

[Iain Lane]

I was just testing some torrents for the 16.10 release, and some of them (the more niche architectures and some flavours) aren't downloading very well at all. See attached picture.

I had a little bit of a research, and there are two things we might consider.

1) Amazon S3 can create & seed torrents. I don't yet know if you can make it act as a seeder on an existing tracker.
2) Torrents can specify "web seed" URLs, which compatible clients connect to over HTTP to request ranges from. This would add some HTTP load to cdimage/releases, but would allow others to get on and seed faster so the torrents become more useful quicker, and would smooth out periods when there aren't many seeders. bittornado's btmakemetafile (used by cdimage) has a "httpseeds" option that looks like it will do this (untested).