Every time an official release date comes along, we get a bunch of servers that are down, if not extremely slow, because of the immense number of people trying to update their machines via Update Manager. Advanced users often encourage people to use Bittorrent to download the latest alternate CD iso and upgrade using that. But why can't the Ubuntu's Update Manager do that for them and use the bittorrent protocol to do it?

Is it possible for Update Manager to have a secondary bittorrent-based capability? The only setting you might have to give it is a port number (if you're using a router and need to forward the port). But for those who don't have more than one computer and a direct connection to the Internet (no router) it should work with no special configuration at all. And perhaps with a little clever tweaking, no special settings would ever be required from the user.

Ubuntu should take greater advantage of bittorrent for its larger updates, so we don't have to worry so much about rush hour traffic on the Internet come October.