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A couple thoughts:

* You can mitigate the popularity thing by using webseeds; if it's popular then it's p2p, and if not then it just falls back to HTTP

* Alternatively, you can 80/20 it; only torrent the 10 biggest and 10 most popular packages (changing 10 to taste), which is a relatively small number of torrents to run while minimizing load on mirrors

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If every torrent includes a webseed, then you're still left with the problem of needing to build a full HTTP CDN, and now have to also maintain the largest tracker infrastructure ever deployed for Bittorrent.

Under normal conditions with well behaved clients, raw bandwidth for the large packages is essentially never the issue. Misbehaving clients, cache thrashing, IOPS are the sort of issues that cause pain for mirrors.

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