All things related to multicast

["Julian Y. Koh" <>]

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OK, some quick and dirty stats: on any given day that's not the historic
inauguration of a new US President, we have 1-2 people watching C-SPAN or
C-SPAN2.

On 1/16, we peaked up at about 150 simultaneous clients logged in as people
tested their multicast connectivity and client compatibility.  Throughout
the weekend and Monday we had about 30-40 clients connected at any given
time.

Things started taking of on Tuesday by 7am Central, when we had ~100
clients connected, and the rate of growth was rather steady up to ~1000
clients right before 10am.  Then the rate of grown increased again at was
steady up to a little over 2000 clients right before 11am.  That was our
peak, where we stayed until 11:30am, which I believe is when Obama stopped
speaking.  Then we have a very quick drop back down to ~1000 clients by
12:20pm, then a slowly decreasing count down to ~500 by 3pm, then leveling
off back at ~100 clients by 8pm.

Throughout it all, the encoder/license server never broke a sweat, staying
at ~.1 load average (the encoding process is mostly hardware-accelerated,
but all the database/stats/licensing is CPU-driven).  Obviously our
outbound bandwidth related to this also stayed at a steady ~5.3Mbps or so
(C-SPAN1 is 2.1Mbps, C-SPAN2 is ~3.2Mbps).

Now, we had definite pains on some of our external traffic due to the
Octoshape P2P streaming that CNN was employing, but luckily we already had
our multicast traffic bypassing the equipment that was hurting.  Otherwise
life would have been not so good for us.  As it was, the pain that people
were experiencing with the unicast streams (and I'm including the Octoshape
streams there as well) is going to serve as a good leverage for publicizing
the multicast-based services.


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-- 
Julian Y. Koh                         
<mailto:>
Network Engineer                                   <phone:847-467-5780>
Telecommunications and Network Services         Northwestern University
PGP Public Key:<http://bt.ittns.northwestern.edu/julian/pgppubkey.html>