Twitter to use BitTorrent for upgrades

Premeditated murder

Social microblogging outfit Twitter is turning to BitTorrent to streamline its server updates.

According to a report on Torrent Freak, the company uses thousands of servers to send information to millions of customers and from time to time those servers need updating.

The company is now planning to use the Open Source Bit Tornado torrent client to distribute updates from a seed server to a swarm of peer servers.

Codenamed Project Murder (a murder is the collective noun for crows, in case you were wondering) the scheme might go some way to polishing the reputation of BitTorrent P2P services, which are more commonly used for pirating software, music and movies.

Twitter reckons an upgrade cycle which could have taken 'dozens of minutes' now takes 'a dozen seconds'.