Downloads are now featuring lighttpd

Posted on Friday 18 January 2008, at 00:10 UTC

Well, being collapsed two times due to releases of somewhat useless ISO motivated us to provide something more robust to deal correctly with those events. At this point, if you think we are going to provide something which can handle the bandwidth required for a direct link on distrowatch, you are just thinking wrong. Why?, because this is the wrong way, you need more than one mirror to handle the load and we didn't plan to provide more than one mirror in a short future. So, the point is to keep the service up in case of such events. The way we chose is probably not a very good news for those who want to provide ISO at incredible downloading rates like we do before. So, we are now using lighttpd instead of Apache because it allows us to throttle the bandwidth used by context. Moreover developing and adding a module to lighttpd is incredibly easy, so we created a module to definitively prevent those stupid download accelerator softwares to connect more than once.

Anyway, we are not happy to do that, but this is the only way we found to keep a good quality of service on the downloads, it only affects the events which make us collapsing and only affects those who make us collapsing, in fact this is a good news for the wide majority of hosted.