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What is mirroring a site?

Why haven't any web servers been built so that they transfer websites via torrents to users instead of the direct HTTP approach which requires mirroring and replication?

  • The torrent protocol could be built directly inside of Apache and a client version inside of a browser like Google Chrome.  Then when the user requests to view a site like Microsoft.com, the server sends a torrent, the client then downloads the site as an "archive" through the torrent network.  This would provide for local mirroring, replication, and local caching even!  And it would be a ton faster than connecting directly to the site's servers as we do today.  HTTP has no knowledge of anything other than a direct connection, so we'd possibly need something like BTTP (BitTorrent Transfer Protocol).  I think this would redefine the web!

  • Answer:

    sounds interesting but...:   - for every change in your web site the server will need to re-generate a new torrent file.    - most of services generate dynamic content, that will have to lead with buffering, generate torrent and of course will create some overhead I would say that nowadays HTTP servers are switches/proxies that works as a transport channel of different data sources. If you think your site content will not change in a fixed period of time.. use bitTorrent-style would help..

Eduardo Silva at Quora Visit the source

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Such a system would only result in extremely slow browsing, and a slight increase in download speeds for large files. 1. Firstly, torrents never give more than 2X speed gain. The main use of a torrent is to distribute the load of serving data to multiple systems, thereby reducing the load on the main server.This is particularly useful if the server is a low cost shared server. 2. Torrents do not give much speed at all for smaller files. The user will first have to connect to the main server and download the torrent file, then  connect to the mirrors to get the actual data. Not to mention, the mirrors would be much much slower than the main server. 3.Most of the requests to sites popular sites on the internet are much less than 2 MB in size, which will in turn slow down browsing.Torrents will work only for static sites(like Wikipedia), and never for dynamic sites(like Facebook . Just imagine the privacy issues that are going to rise if Facebook gives away some of their data for storing in mirrors. 4. Dynamic sites require a unified database, not one that is scattered in mirrors. On the whole, the entire point of caching data to mirrors is lost.

Kiran Mathew Koshy

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