Best settings for high speed LAN distribution?

[ton_koopman]

Hi all,

I am using uTorrent to distribute large files to multiple machines on an isolated LAN.  The files themselves, although not important, are Virtual Machines that need to be distributed to dozens of client machines.

Although the performance using this approach is not bad, I was wondering if anyone had any insight on how best to tweak uTorrent to get the best performance out of such an environment.

The odd thing is that I have seen very different throughput using what seem like nearly identical environments.  Aside from playing with the settings, the one take away seems to be using dumb switches seems preferable to smart switches.

Thanks for any input!

[PiusX]

Because different seeders have different bandwidth that is why speeds are different.

[ton_koopman]

Using identical machines as both seeders and clients.  

When I try the exact same thing, but in a different room (which may be down the hall or in a different country, therefore potentially different switches), the speed changes by 3x or 4x.  But again, we are talking to the identical host hardware.

[PiusX]

Put this way no two identical setups will be a clone of each other. You have to factor alot of other things at play here and that is beyond utorrent itself discussion.

[ton_koopman]

Still hoping for some input here...

Again, the concept here is to use uTorrent to distribute hundreds of GB to many machines.  The machines are all identical (including the seeders).  The network is segregated on their own vLans.  All switches are at a minimum GB with 10GB backplanes and cables are cat-6.  I would expect that the throughput would be a fair bit higher than I'm seeing.

Anyone else using this approach to distribute large files on a local LAN.  It certainly scales well and is fairly quick.  It is 'safer' than cloning in as much as it reduces the risk of a problem in the middle of a cycle taking out the machine (using a multicast clone, a power or network failure would leave the machines in an unusable state if the clone wasn't 100% complete)... the torrent approach is complete restartable.  It also allows distribution at the file level instead at the disk level (which is what a clone would do).