I have a requirement by my client to be able to upload extremely large files.
I’m talking about 7 GB files. The website they are currently running on is a ASP.NET 4.0 app, so obviously the standard upload scheme for my web app is not going to work.
I’m tossing around multiple options trying to figure out what the best route to go would be.
One option I’m thinking about seeing if I can do would be to have a BitTorrent Uploader. The end users for this app will typically have the same file on hand, so the idea would be that an end user would go to the site, say that they wanted to upload a file. At that point, they would pick the file, and then the server would immediately mark that person as a seed for that file. Then, my web app would go to a preconfigured leech on our side, and instruct the leech to download the file. I would expect at some point during or after this process the torrent would do some magic to find other seeders on the client’s network, or wherever, but that’s the idea.
Is there any technology out there already that does this? Or am I describing something that I’m going to have to build from the ground up?
It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be easy to do this with BitTorrent. In order for BT to work, you need torrent files. In order to create a torrent file for a particular file, you need that file (the torrent file basically contains a hash of the file). In general for a torrent, you need a tracker. You could rely on a public one, but that could be a risky dependency. You could operate your own, but that has other challenges (for one, you’d have to make sure it’s locked down so it doesn’t become a free-for-all for all the latest movies, music & TV).
Assuming you have a tracker in place, you then need to coordinate the downloading of torrents. Your users are going to have to create the torrent files, which is an extra complicated step, then presumably upload them via usual HTTP methods. As well as getting the user to upload the torrent, you’d have to remind the user to start seeding the torrent in their client of choice. You’d then want to automatically begin leeching the torrent (again, security issue here – what if a user uploads a completely unrelated torrent for the latest episode of House?). Apart from the security problem, this is probably the easiest part – most torrent clients can be configured to watch a directory and automatically start downloading torrent files in that directory. Once you’ve started downloading, you have to make sure that the user continues seeding the torrent until you’ve completed, otherwise you’ll be stuck with a useless partial file.
It could all work, but without a fair bit of customisation work it’s going to be a convoluted process at best for your users, and quite possibly beyond them. Obviously I don’t know your specific requirements, but I’d be looking at more traditional file transfer protocols, like http://FTP…..