October 24, 2006 2:18 PM PDT
10,000 Fedora downloads in five hours
If you're curious what the appetite is for Fedora Core 6, Red Hat's newest version of Linux for hobbyists, the company has an answer: 10,000 downloads in five hours.
Doing the math, that works out to one download every 1.8 seconds. And considering that the minimum size of Fedora Core 6 is 3.4GB, it's no surprise Red Hat's servers fell to their knees after the release Tuesday.
Although not all the downloads taxed the servers. The 10,000 statistic includes downloads through BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that doesn't tax central download servers as much as direct downloads.
Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen.
