[vlc-devel] Future of the update mechanism

[Francois Cartegnie]

Le jeudi 30 juillet 2009, Jean-Baptiste Kempf a écrit :
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 05:26:32PM +0200, Rafaël Carré wrote :
> > For my own curiosity, does someone know how much users did use the
> > update mechanism? (download stats of update.videolan.org/status*)
>
> Around 1.5M requests per day.

Why not trying to lower the servers load with next releases ?
I suggest using name resolution for checking updates instead of hitting http 
servers:
- My version is 0.9.0 and update sequence is 101. 
- If there's a new version 102 will exist.
- DNS query for update102.updates.videolan.org
- if reply is (example) 110.110.110.110 then no update is available
- if reply is (example) 111.111.111.111 then query by http for filename (1)

Benefits are simple: 
- DNS queries are kept in cache of every provider.
- Max 512 bytes replies / no need to manage 3 way handshakes for UDP queries 
on master DNS servers.

(1) can also avoid pre-http query by providing filename in the reverse an the 
IP.

Francois