Someone recently told me that Facebook had a torrent file that went around the company that people could use to download the entire codebase using a BitTorrent client. Is there any truth in this?
I mean, the same guy that told me this, also said that the codebase size was about 50 times less than the one reported in this slide, so it may all be pure speculation.
If you're interested in the deployment process at Facebook, look at the link of a Facebook engineers paper I submitted in my other comment in this thread : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7648802
"The deployed executable
size is around 1.5 Gbytes, including the Web server and compiled Facebook application. The code
and data propagate to all servers via BitTorrent, which is configured to minimize global traffic
by exploiting cluster and rack affinity. The time needed to propagate to all the servers is roughly
20 minutes."
That sounds entirely believable. At $PREVIOUS_JOB, the Puppet git repository was large enough (several GB) that cloning it was painful, and new starters were handed a pruned repository via the local network so that they could get something done today.
I mean, the same guy that told me this, also said that the codebase size was about 50 times less than the one reported in this slide, so it may all be pure speculation.