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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It's not really worth it for small downloads. I looked at one of my projects and it is an 880kb download.

If you are talking a gigabyte or more there is a big advantage in terms of (1) a completely reliable download, and (2) being able to split up the download into multiple streams. At home I have two ADSL lines and a load balancer and with bittorrent I get double-speed downloads.

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Why don't large companies use it for updates? I have a lot of trouble downloading the 10+ gigabyte IOS downloads on DSL for some reason but torrenting works fine for larger files and stopping and resuming does not break torrenting unlike Apple's update process.

Some have. Blizzard used a variant of BitTorrent about 10 - 15 years ago to distribute the multi-gigabyte patches for their online games. Peak demand was very high with hundreds of thousands of users all on the same day.

It was built into the game installer / launcher. I think they've switched away from that since. I remember it causing some consternation at the time given some people pay by the byte for network service and felt it was unfair.

iirc Windows does have a way that computers on a shared network can share the update with each other.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-d...

I don't know how they do it but when I download from Steam there are multiple streams and I get about 200% of the throughput of a single ADSL.

I don't know if this would be of interest to you, but https://lancache.net/ is really fun to setup. I assigned an old (unreliable) 500gb SSD to a Linux VM and run Lancache on it. A couple tweaks to Pi Hole and every system in your house will use with no configuration (and fallback to Steam if it's down).

If you only have a single gaming system it won't matter but if you have a few it's fun to watch the second one get 100MB/s Steam downloads in a house with 20MB/s internet.

Steam downloads are plain HTTP in separate file chunks. Easy to cache and load balance across connections.

They are also slow as dirt.

Taxes killed p2p...

https://youtu.be/5-sF7N1bfv0

Or more clearly stated, tax havens and offshoring revenue killed p2p.

Even without the tax havens, the jurisdictional issues seem killer -- if I pay for software in Kansas and download blocks from Texas, California, Puerto Rico and Canada, who all do I owe sales tax to?

Musescore is planning to use P2P sharing to download sample libraries (>1gb) and updates in version 4 (coming in the next few months).

Its redundancy. Just because the download is small, doesnt mean your webserver providing the downloads doesnt go down.

Sure, but if the webserver providing the downloads goes down, usually so does the website providing the torrent link.

Theres other ways if you can control the firewall ports, ie keep one open and then that could also be a website with links. It depends on how much extra thats built into an app.

Magnet link would still show up in the search engine cache.

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