Solutions for Serving Lots of .torrents? 53
torpor asks: "For 10 years now my friends and I have managed to form a loose musicians collective with the purpose of putting our totally free music/art online for free access.
Lately, we've been discussing the approach we can take to utilize BitTorrent to do our file distribution, with the idea being that we can use it to cut our bandwidth costs from that of a single server, and 'spread the bandwidth' among us for hosting files.
However, we've found that serving a large number of torrent feeds from one server is not quite so easy as it sounds, as it appears we have to have a single instance -per file- of the torrent server.
What solutions are available for Bittorrent-like distribution of media files? We're a small group of budding stars, and we want our tunes out there in the free world. Are we limited to continuing to serve things by HTTP, or are there easy/simple ways of starting a large-quantity of torrent feeds which, perhaps in our fervour, we're overlooking?"
How about having no server at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is just starting out and has problems, but if it shapes up the way they intend, it sounds like it would be perfect for you to host any of your art elsewhere with whatever licensing you want. If this works out, it would be a lot simpler, too. Certainly it would be easy to test. The worst thing I have seen is that it often takes 30+ hours for something you uploaded to be listed.
The Matrix? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
But if we start the distribution from a system we own and control and monitor ourselves, it puts us in the position we want to be in, as artists, to keep track of things. Putting it on some other host just gives that host the right to manage our free art accordingly
Thanks!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
No problems with that here.. (Score:4, Interesting)
We're not having any trouble serving lots of torrent files [plkr.org] from the same instance of the server. To the tune of over 109GiB of Plucker [plkr.org] torrent downloads this year.
That doesn't count the downloads over http, rsync, and through our mirrors. Probably another 200GiB there, rough estimate.
I use bttrack and point it to the torrent directory (locked with --allowed_dir of course), and it works great.
I run a separate server on a separate port for various projects, to separate the torrents per-project. No issues at all.
Re:Azureus (Score:3, Interesting)