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Our software is used from portable devices (usually usb) as users move between computers (PortableApps.com). As such, using bittorrent would be a technical opt

Our software is used from portable devices (usually usb) as users move between computers (PortableApps.com). As such, using bittorrent would be a technical option within our platform's app store/updater. It would, however, get our platform banned/blocked at many companies and universities that have policies forbidding bittorrent use. (And we can say all day long that it's a legit protocol with lots of legit uses like downloading linux ISOs, it doesn't change the facts and policies on the ground.) Additionally, most users will be behind NATs that they can't poke a hole through to be able to properly share. As for images, the bittorrent protocol would just be way too slow even with some changes when compared to HTTP with SPDY and all the internal tweaks done at the geographically close CDN edge nodes to make them as fast as possible. 150ms before adding a new peer is an eternity in an age when 47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and the abandon rate increases with each second that passes with 40% abandoning at a little after the 3 second mark.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
Couldn't you use an inexpensive CDN like Cloudflare? Your origin would see transfer to Cloudflare, but they'd be able to offload the majority of your download traffic. You also wouldn't be charged per GB as happens with Cloudfront.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  I'm not that familiar with Cloudflare and unsure how well it would work with a Drupal-based site. They do appear to have a module ( https://drupal.org/project/cloudflare https://drupal.org/project/cloudflare ) but it seems like it is a beta and hasn't been developed in a few months. It does seem like it would be more expensive for the level with an SLA ($200 for business plan) than the CDN we use now (which is $79 a month for our images and includes 1TB of bandwidth, about what we need. excluding binary downloads, of course). Do you have any direct experience with CloudFlare?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I haven't used it with Drupal before; we're using it to cache a read-only JSON service in the event of failure, heavy load, etc. We've been pretty happy with them. You could always try their free or $20/month plan on a separate subdomain.

toomuchtodo 13y ago

Couldn't you use an inexpensive CDN like Cloudflare? Your origin would see transfer to Cloudflare, but they'd be able to offload the majority of your download traffic. You also wouldn't be charged per GB as happens with Cloudfront.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
I'm not that familiar with Cloudflare and unsure how well it would work with a Drupal-based site. They do appear to have a module ( https://drupal.org/project/cloudflare https://drupal.org/project/cloudflare ) but it seems like it is a beta and hasn't been developed in a few months. It does seem like it would be more expensive for the level with an SLA ($200 for business plan) than the CDN we use now (which is $79 a month for our images and includes 1TB of bandwidth, about what we need. excluding binary downloads, of course). Do you have any direct experience with CloudFlare?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  I haven't used it with Drupal before; we're using it to cache a read-only JSON service in the event of failure, heavy load, etc. We've been pretty happy with them. You could always try their free or $20/month plan on a separate subdomain.