First of all, to help with Tsunami relief, Google’s page is a good start. As is Amazon’s Red Cross Diaster Relief page ($3.8M and counting), where I donated. Apple.com also has direct links to relief/support agencies.
I threw in two machines tonight to help out Andy w/ his Tsunami videos that he’s been hosting. There’s apparently a ginormous demand, mostly coming from Google searches (#2 for tsunami video).
On my EV1 server, I’m averaging 85Mbps+ on the 100Mbps interface, and have just upped MaxClients and ServerLimit to 600 (after hitting 500). At this rate (36GB/hr) I’ll have to take it off the rotation tomorrow. Same with my SM machine, which is averaging about 21GB/hr. Between the machines on the round robin, I’m guessing that conservatively, we’re averaging at least 100GB/hr.
What’s interesting is that this dwarfs the BitTorrent traffic of the videos being served elsewhere. From my earlier Crossfire and Internets Vets experience, I’ve found this ratio to be between about 50:1 to 100:1 when both the torrents and direct links are given equal visual standing.
This isn’t to say that CacheLogic’s traffic numbers are inaccurate (they say BT accounts for 35% of all Internet traffic). I believe it. But the numbers I see from my own experience lead me to believe that the majority of that traffic is still being consumed by a relative minority of users (centered around predictable types of content), and that most people still tend toward direct downloads when available, regardless of performance.
Blog Torrent and Prodigem look like steps in the right direction for simplifying tracking, but I believe the fundamental bottleneck still lies in user adoption. Unfortunately, I don’t think this problem can be solved in a significant fashion until torrents are made transparent either by being integrated/bundled with browsers or available as ActiveX and XPI plugins, but we’ll see. In the near future, I should be able to have a much larger dataset to work against.
[Update: Hosting these tsunami videos was interesting. For the day that I threw in, at no point was transfer below 150Mbps (about 1TB of transfer). The bandwidth available was probably over 0.5Gbps and it was completely saturated. After Andy moved the videos over to Archive.org, the demand took them offline. When you have that much demand, it becomes pretty obvious how to get people to use BitTorrent – make it the only option available.]