In the episode, there were 5 things they said out loud.
Hence, Dinesh tried to decrease the manifest file sizes by compressing them (probably using the algorithm Richard wrote)
Since pied-piper was self-hosted at that time (thanks to Son of Anton), they couldn’t scale immediately given these issues.
Add new servers: Gilfoyle To handle the previous issues, Gilfoyle started adding new servers.
Compiling Varnish to cache the manifests: Erlich Bachman Varnish is a caching HTTP reverse proxy. Erlich just compiled varnish so that manifest files can be cached for faster responses.
Reduce the seeds in the P2P swarm: Dinesh I don’t have enough data to reach a conclusion. However, I tried to make the nearest guess I could.
In a Peer2Peer network, where there is no single server.
Seeds or Seeders are the ones who have the entire file and share them (seed) with other peers.
Leechers are the ones who have the entire file but don’t share them with other peers.
Swarm is a group consisting of peers, seeders, leechers, etc…
Maybe they wanted the peer-to-seed ratio to be optimal. To accommodate new peers, they might have started moving seeds to different swarms with no/fewer seeds.
Whatever they did, it worked as they rescued the condor man as pied-piper scaled it real quick.