Gee's Blog World: BitTorrent finds another legal use: Facebook's server farms

Friday, July 2, 2010

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.