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BitTorrent finds another legal use: Facebook's server farms
Say what you like about BitTorrent and the culture of piratical drugged-up junkies that it fuels, but the fact is: big businesses keep finding excellent, legitimate uses for torrents. Today, Facebook came out and admitted that BitTorrent powers the transfer of new code between each and every one of its servers.You wouldn't have thought it troublesome -- source code is fairly lightweight after all -- but when you consider that Facebook has tens of thousands of servers... well, you can begin to imagine the logistical nightmare of rolling out code changes on a regular basis. With BitTorrent, it takes a matter of minutes to update every single Facebook Web server with new software -- awesome!
As TorrentFreak points out, Facebook isn't the only large company that uses BitTorrent -- so does Twitter! BitTorrent isn't relegated to internal uses, though: Blizzard uses it to distribute huge patches to its 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers!
You only need to take a quick look at the BitTorrent Inc. Wiki page to get a better idea of just how many companies might be using BitTorrent to speed up their data transfers.
Comments
7
Subscribe to commentskojo87Jun 27th 2010 3:08AM
there is nothing illegal about BitTorrent itself. it just happens that people mostly use it for illegal purposes and BitTorrent ends up with a bad rap which is unfortunate.
Sax25Jun 27th 2010 12:23PM
Someone should wake up Microsoft and tell them this. Everytime they offer us a time limited version of their software - Office, Windows 7 etc - these files are like 3GB+ yet they stupidly put it on http and therefore everyone trying to grab it gets the file at a snails pace and that's only if we haven't all crashed their servers - WHY?!!!!!
Bittorrent would offload their traffic by a huge margin yet Microsoft year after year fail to utilise one of the best options they have at their disposal and every year when they offer a new software package, everyone jumps onto grab it and we get 404 pages.
WAKE THE HELL UP MICROSOFT!!!!!!!!!!!!
DonJun 27th 2010 11:44PM
Interesting thought. It'll never happen, though...
livebriandJun 27th 2010 3:26PM
I'm not wasting my upload speed for this. They should use their own servers.
Naomi MostJun 30th 2010 9:36PM
Nobody's using your bandwidth to update their servers. That's not how Facebook is using BitTorrent.
livebriandJun 30th 2010 10:45PM
What I mean is for the torrent's upload - I'm not wasting my upload speed on this.
Ethan MikosukiSep 12th 2010 1:57PM
This is another great example of a practical, legal use of BitTorrent technology. For consumers there are a few different outlets for legal torrents like http://www.newmediarights.org/business_models/artist/how_find_free_and_legal_bittorrent_sites but I think that the best uses coming from BitTorrent are enterprise solutions like this.