Surge on demand for some Debian 'netinst' ISOs on BitTorrent

[Felipe Maia]

Dear Image/CD Team

I've been serving, through BitTorrent, all the 52 images (ISOs) of Debian 12.5 since one or two weeks after the release.

I've noticed a surge on demand for 4 'netinst' images on the last approximately 7 days. The images are (in the presented order):

- debian-12.5.0-arm64-netinst.iso
- debian-mac-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso
- debian-edu-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso
- debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso

These images were around the 10th to the 15th positions in demand. All the sudden, I've been having a very high demand for them, much more than I've seen for all these months. It's an increase of something like 10 fold. In these few days, they jumped to the first 4 positions in the ranking and are far beyond the former first place, which was 'debian-12.5.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso' as expected. The ranking order was quite stable for all these months until now.

I wonder if someone knows what's happening, if other people serving the images with BitTorrent are having the same experience, and if this phenomena is also happening with the images downloaded from the Debian Image Servers.

Cheers

Felipe Maia

[Mattias Wadenstein]

Post by Felipe Maia
Dear Image/CD Team
I've been serving, through BitTorrent, all the 52 images (ISOs) of
Debian 12.5 since one or two weeks after the release.

Hi!

Post by Felipe Maia
I've noticed a surge on demand for 4 'netinst' images on the last
- debian-12.5.0-arm64-netinst.iso
- debian-mac-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso
- debian-edu-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso
- debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso
These images were around the 10th to the 15th positions in demand. All
the sudden, I've been having a very high demand for them, much more than
I've seen for all these months. It's an increase of something like 10
fold. In these few days, they jumped to the first 4 positions in the
ranking and are far beyond the former first place, which was
'debian-12.5.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso' as expected. The ranking order was quite
stable for all these months until now.

Interesting find!

Unfortunately the main seeder doesn't keep track of historical data very
much, just a bunch of rtorrent processes in screens. Overall traffic is
also tiny, at around 15 Mbit/s average outgoing traffic.

Post by Felipe Maia
I wonder if someone knows what's happening, if other people serving the
images with BitTorrent are having the same experience, and if this
phenomena is also happening with the images downloaded from the Debian
Image Servers.

On https downloads from cdimage.debian.org I don't see any big change. The
mac netinst has a doubling in demand in the last 7 days compared to the
whole month, but that's not a huge surge and it isn't reflected in any of
the other netinst images.

/Mattias Wadenstein

[Felipe Maia]

Post by Mattias Wadenstein
Hi!

Hi Mattias. Thanks for the reply.

Post by Mattias Wadenstein
Interesting find!

That's what I thought! :)

Since I use my own personal computer, I take a look every day, just to see if everything is fine. Because of that, I became curious to know if there is a good demand for the Debian images using BitTorrent instead of the the image server (cdimage.debian.org). Also, I gave a lightning talk on MiniDebConf Brazil this year about my experience serving the images with BitTorrent in order to encourage others to do the same, with the purpose of helping other users and to save the server. I might also write a little article about it in the future.

Post by Mattias Wadenstein
Unfortunately the main seeder doesn't keep track of historical data very
much, just a bunch of rtorrent processes in screens. Overall traffic is
also tiny, at around 15 Mbit/s average outgoing traffic.

The demand to me increased from around 200 kbps to 2,000 kbps in the last few weeks, specifically because of these 'netinst' images.

Post by Mattias Wadenstein
On https downloads from cdimage.debian.org I don't see any big change. The
mac netinst has a doubling in demand in the last 7 days compared to the
whole month, but that's not a huge surge and it isn't reflected in any of
the other netinst images.

Interesting that this pattern seems to be restricted to BitTorrent then.

If you, or anyone else, notice something, please let me know.

I'm curious to know what will happen after next weekend, with the release of 12.6 and the replacement of the 12.5 images.

Felipe