All things related to multicast

[Alan Crosswell <>]

Most of the popular news sights like CNN are not using Akamai.  We saw
only a minor increase in bandwidth coming out of our Akamai stack on
campus of about 150 Mbps (vs. about 40 Mbps into it).  This was only
maybe a 10-20% increase over a typical day.  Now maybe our on-campus
stack is only doing static pages and not stream caching.  It's hard to
tell what those boxes are up to.
/a

Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Julian Y. Koh wrote:
>
> Obama inauguration sets Web traffic record, Akamai says
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012109-obama-inauguration-web-traffic.html
>
> -Hank
>
> 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.
>
>
>>
-- 
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>
>>