NDT-DEV email list created

[Will Hawkins <>]

As promised, here is a copy of the update I sent to MLab staffers about 
the progress on HTTP-based NDT test for the NDT Flash client.

Will


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Update on Flash Client
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 21:41:52 -0400
From: Will Hawkins 
<>
To: MLabStaff 
<>

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to send a quick update on the progress of the Flash
client. We hoped that moving to the HTTP-based test was going to
alleviate some of the problems we saw with Socket-based I/O being too
slow to measure high bandwidth connections.

While this may be the case, we have run into another interesting
problem. The system the Flash runtime uses to implement URL loading
spools the entire file being downloaded. This means that on a very fast
connection, there comes a time when the runtime uses *way* too much
memory and the entire thing grinds to a halt.

We thought that using a stream-based URL downloader (also available to
developers through the Flash runtime) might be a good compromise.
Although developers are able to access bytes of the download as they
arrive, there is no way to tell the runtime to "forget" them. There are
references to this being a known bug in either the URL stream downloader
or the runtime garbage collection. We've tried all the available
workarounds and had no success.

We will keep digging in to this but right now we seem to be stuck.

Will