BitTorrent Using Facebook to Do Legal Things - The UpStream

BitTorrent Using Facebook to Do Legal Things

posted Sunday Jun 27, 2010 by Nicholas DiMeo

BitTorrent Using Facebook to Do Legal Things

The evidence has always existed that large corporations will find useful, excellent ways to use torrent services and Facebook has joined the list of big businesses supporting torrents by stating this week that BitTorrent helps with the transfer of new code between each and every one of its servers.

Read more about what the Facebook engineers had to say after the break!

Tom Cook, one of Facebook's systems engineers, said that the daily (and completely broken) code updates for Facebook used to cause a lot of trouble until they discovered BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it's really great. It's 'superduper' fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we've had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.

Now, granted, their code is awful and definitively not up to any sort of standards, but 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.

It should be noted that other useless companies, like Twitter, also use BitTorrent to accomplish the same goal. On the other hand, Blizzard uses the torrent service to send large patches to its 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers.

Torrents can and are used for very extreme data copying and moving and not just for pirating. It's nice to see that coming to light more and more in the recent months, especially after all the attacking Congress and RIAA have been doing to the services.

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