User:LFaraone/Ideas/BitTorrent
< User:LFaraone | Ideas
What:
- BitTorrent in Browse and on the wiki
Why:
- OLPC's servers will be put under considerable stress due to large amounts of users visiting the wiki from the third world. As the sole provider of activity downloads, OLPC will be serving files that can be very large; some of the Wikislices are larger than 100MB, not to mention the 300+MB OS images.
- BitTorrent is an open protocol, and there are many open source implementations, many of which are written in Python or have Python bindings. Intergration of existing libraries allows for lower matinence costs and less up-front-effort.
- BitTorrent is efficent; it requires only a server to "track" a torrent (and some torrents are trackerless). The server has minimal work, other than the initial "seeding" of a file to the public. As torrents are more popular, the speed often increases, as each new downloader is also increasing the "health" of the torrent via uploading.
How:
