All things related to multicast

[Hank Nussbacher <>]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009, Alan Crosswell wrote:

Hi Alan!  Been what - 27 years?  In any event, I once heard from Akamai 
that they have "different" stacks deployed - at academia they have servers 
that serve up static content whereas at ISPs they have servers that serve 
up streaming and dynamic content.  We too did not see any jump in Akamai 
traffic at our 3 server stack:
http://noc.ilan.net.il/stats/TEL-AVIV-GP/akamai_hp_switch.html

-Hank

> 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>
> > >