On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 05:38:38PM -0500, Greg Brooks wrote:
Bradley, thanks (and thank you to everyone else who was helpful as well!) for this.
Bittorrent is an innovative solution -- I like it! However, I'm hampered by:
- Corporate clients and their corporate IT departments who will be sniffy
about using it.
- Unsophisticated users who are comfy with FTP and don't want to learn new
tools.
- Many different clients who need the bandwidth boost, so a point-to-point
solution isn't a good fit.
Soooo... looks like I may be the only guy in Plattsburg with a T-1. (That'd be my guess, anyway -- it's a pretty tiny town.)
(Background for the folks who asked: We're doing some outsourcing work for newspapers, and the typical work deliverable is a bundle of EPS pages that weighs in at 70-300 mb. All of our client papers have extremely high bandwidth and can download the pages quickly... it's getting them uploaded to FTP on deadline that's taking more time than we'd like.)
FTP being based on UDP is connectionless so no worries about TCP connections being trashed by confusion over IP addresses.
The BONDING section of the article pointed to, by Johnathan Hutchins I think, specifically mentions that it works with DSL.
UDP is inherently unreliable so the receiving software must deal with packets arriving from multiple routers, intermediate hosts, with differing amounts of delay so FTP software reassembles out of order packets coming from different addresses constantly.
So bonding should help, but I would like to ask if these pages could be generated as "one page" files so that individual pages could be mirrored to a high speed connected server while the next one is being assembled ? That way you can combine all the pages if needed for the final push at deadline across the high speed link and spread the use of your limited upload speed out over time when it would otherwise go unused.
-- Ed Allen