Facebook und Twitter setzen BitTorrent ein

Filesharing mal anders.

Torrentfreak über den Einsatz von BitTorrent bei Twitter:

“Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds,” [Twitter engineer Larry] Gadea commented.

BitTorrent is 75 times faster when compared to the old server deployment system, reducing deployments across thousands of servers to just a few seconds. With BitTorrent, every server not only downloads the new files, but also becomes a distribution point that helps to spread it to others.

Torrentfreak über den Einsatz von BitTorrent bei Facebook:

With their BitTorrent-powered distribution system Facebook is now able to send a few hundred MB to tens of thousands of machines in just one minute. The internal Facebook swarm turns every server into a peer that helps in distributing the new code, which gets it updated as quickly as possible. Without BitTorrent this process could take several hours to complete.

Auch Universitäten setzen BitTorrent ein, und sparen dadurch Geld:

A Dutch university reported that it retired 20 of the 22 servers it used to send out updates to workstations, saving not only time but also money.

(Hervorhebungen von mir)

Filesharing ist die effizienteste Form der Verbreitung von digitalen Inhalten über das Netz. BitTorrent selbst ist wiederrum aktuell das effizienteste Filesharing-Protokoll. Es ist wenig verwunderlich, dass Web-Unternehmen wie Twitter und Facebook beginnen, diese Distributionsmöglichkeiten auch intern zur Effizienzsteigerung zu nutzen. Und Facebook und Twitter werden nicht die letzten Unternehmen sein.