By Gunnar Langemark on

I got this idea from another thread:

Would it be cool to make a pool?

A sort of opt in traffic sharing program - perhaps a module too?
Like bittorrent or something like that.

I envision a sort of closed cirquit (only contributors get access to upload ... )

Is it feasible?
The Drupal Bandwidth Pool.

Gunnar Langemark

Comments

jjeff’s picture

jjeff commented

Well Bittorrent is Bittorrent. And while I think that a Bittorent module would be very cool, it still requires opening a separate app in order to download, and yet another separate app to view. You can't beat it for solving bandwidth issues, though!

I'm envisioning more of a round-robin option for upload.module - but this would also require upload.module to support external files (not in the files directory) - which it doesn't.

Another option would be an extension to a link-tracker type module that would work as a content filter scanning for http:// urls and a) allowing for click tracking, along with b) allowing for round-robin distribution!

So for instance, you could say "when a user requests http://www.example.com/files/big_file.mov, choose the next file in this list to give them". This way it would work for inline content too. The filter would change the actual inline link to something like http://www.example.com/linktrack/1234 or better yet http://www.example.com/linktrack/www.example.com/files/big_file.mov.

Hmmm... Maybe this makes more sense in my head than it does on the page. Maybe I should just whip up some code...

--= Jeff Robbins | www.lullabot.com =--

Gunnar Langemark’s picture

Gunnar Langemark commented

that sounds like a great idea.

One word of caution though: I'm not really sure if various hosting plans would like/permit the spread of bandwidth use that way.
A good system would be able to fill the bandwidth usage to its fullest, and that might not be what a hosting service calculates with.

Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com

jjeff’s picture

jjeff commented

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Can you expand?

Some hosting systems guard against hotlinking, but other than that, I don't see any problems.

--= Jeff Robbins | www.lullabot.com =--

ixis.dylan’s picture

ixis.dylan commented

Any shared hosting business that oversells their bandwidth or space on the assumption that users, on average, won't use all of what they're paying for is a horrible monster and deserves a flaying from the clue-whip.

demolicious | leafish

ixis.dylan’s picture

ixis.dylan commented

I'm not sure what kind of system you have in mind here, but it sounds time-consuming and complex.

A simpler system for this kind of thing would be a node type that allows users to add their own "mirror" links to the file, hosted on their own server. Lots of problems with security and integrity here.

Bandwidth is relatively cheap these days, and Bittorrent is already the established way of sharing the load of downloads. It works, too.

demolicious | leafish