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Where The Bandwidth Goes
An anonymous reader writes "An often overlooked fact about network bandwidth utilization is that the bandwidth consumed on networks is more than the sum of the data exchanged at the highest level; it's data+overhead+upkeep. In the early 90's I worked for a large multi-national company whose software engineering department had a transatlantic x.25 circuit connection to it's European engineering headquarters. It was necessary that the connection be 'on' 24x7 due to the spanning of a large number of time zones, disparate working hours and tight contractual requirements. Very large data transfers were sometimes operationally essential. But the financial people used to scream constantly about the circuit costs (charged per packet, IIRC) of several thousand dollars/month. The sys admin realized that if he just reduced the frequency of keep-alives, he could shave something like 10% off the monthly bill. This article points out that p2p applications are greater bandwidth hogs than one might think because of the foregoing and more - they also search, accept pushed advertising and do other transactions that are transparent to most users, but add up. I doubt that developers of those free p2p applications have gave much thought to efficiency. This will be no surprise to many of you, but helps explain why ISP's rushing to put caps on transfers."
it has nothing to do w/the advertising, the searches, etc. It has to do SOLELY w/the LARGE downloads that users of P2P networks do.
;)) Now that everyone is back (and I assume loving Kazaa to it's limit) I average about 75 to 100k/s.
Over the summer (when no one was in this little college town) I was steadily get 250+k/s downloads (mostly updating Debian
I am even tempted to call Road Runner and complain (I am just too lazy to fix Win98 and have it running so they can do their tests).
DiVX and MP3s are what kills the bandwith. Not the little "inefficiencies" that P2P authors added in.
Actually P2P work does focus on efficiency because efficiency determines how large the network can scale on a give set of hardware (the users machines and comodity internet connections). ISP's want to cap bandwidth because their current business model demands that they oversubscribe their uplink by around 20-200 times depending on the type and pricing of the comodity connection. Besides caps are based on total bandwidth usage which includes networking overhead (the routers accounting program doesn't care about payload usually)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We need web caches... It's stupid to have files crossing the ocean thousands of times. Besides not using web caches causes that those who cannot afford bandwidth costs cannot put content in the web... Caches now!.
Web developers must not be afraid of web caches, since the HTTP/1.1 protocol allows them to precisely define how and when their content will be cached.
If you're anywhere near being a k0der you'll be squeezing your head in digust. for fifteen+ years we've been battling against asm-style two/three letter variable declarations, and finally have languages that have helped us define naming conventions and the like, and you want us to go BACK to TLA's??? (TLA = two/three letter acronym)
are you insane?
The more they cap usage, the less people will use (obviously). Then content providers such as streaming radio stations will start to drop off as it becomes more expensive for users to access them.
After that it becomes a vicious circle, with fewer content providers, there's no reason for users to keep their service. Then the ISPs go broke.
Take a look at the Australian example. Almost all broadband providers have a 3Gb monthly cap. The ABC has just started an internet-only radio station, but I really wonder why. It wouldn't take too many days of listening to it for a user to totally max out their cap. I predict the station will be closed due to lack of interest, within a year.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
the geek it me though, says "waaa" and that things that dont evolve, die. and the things that dont die. p2p pushes the envelope right now, but all that encourages is more network growth. just think of p2p as those pains you had in your legs when you were 14. sure, it may not be the most efficient thing in the world, but the underlaying infrastructure has to take that into account, or get out of the way for one that can.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
>>most of us dont need the damn hungarian notation that MS has spreads like gospel truth
Why said anything about that? And besides, MS now discourages its use.
>>It makes for unreadable names that convey less meaning that a nice clear variable name.
Which 'fn' is not but 'FirstName' is.
Now, if you have a dynamically generated page, you could use constants that are set to short stuff like 'fn'. Less code to be transmitted while still keeping most of the readability of the original code. If you discover a bug, temporarily switch to a different set of constants ('FirstName' instead of 'fn') until you sort it out so the resultant HTML is more readable. (Same goes with whitespace: Make a constant ENDL or NEWLINE that is set to '\n' while debugging, then changes to '' for production.)
..is airing this commercial of goofy testimonials for their broadband cable service. A kid says "Ever been in the belly of a whale? I have", another guy goes "I go to the moon and back twice a day", etc.. etc..
Now, one of them has some guy say "I collected everything Mozart ever did... In 10 minutes!"
To me that's comes through loud and clear as "*wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* napster(etc)!"
I would say p2p is the driving force behind non-geeks getting broadband. They don't need it for e-mail, or casual web-surfing. They don't play games, but I know many people eager for an alternative to the bland junk on the radio. (Plus due to geography, radio reception is poor here)
Same thing with the 'work from home' bunk they promote, and yet block VPN connections.
It's like dangling a carrot in front of a mule to get him to move, and he stupidly chases it not realising he'll never reach it. It works fine in cartoons, but eventually the mule becomes frustrated, kicks you, and refuses to move at all.
Someone is smart enough to figure a way to give out the bandwidth and make money at the same time. And, it won't be a monopoly. Maybe 802.11 will be our savior?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Yes but, (if your University was like mine), you don't pay for it. Access to the universities private network was a privelege of living on campus. They were bound by a fixed budget that came out of our tuitions/res fees and had to accomodate everyone. Our house, our rules..
I pay for my cable powered internet. I don't see their right to tell me what I can and can't do with it, it was part of no contract I signed, save some ambiguous crap about removing "abusive" users at their discretion.
I made another post in this forum about how they use p2p and VPN as incentives to sell the service. Bait and switch.
The business model in short (and not a lame SP troll):
Split a 10mbit pipe over 1000 users. Most only know how to read e-mail and read dilbert cartoons so they'll never notice we oversold ourselves. Kick the few that will off, cite bandwidth abuse as the reason. (How you 'abuse' something they sold you unlimited access to still escapes me)
The 'stupid sheep' they counted on forking 40-100 bucks a month for something they'd never use, found something to use it for.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The article itself was kind of ho-hum, but the following part of the Slashdot intro caught my attention:
Again...wow. One would need to search far and wide, even on Slashdot, to find another example of such absolutely astonishing cluelessness. Timothy has obviously never talked to a P2P developer in his life. Sometimes it seems like efficiency is just about the only thing P2P developers think about, unless someone's on a security/anonymity rant. Little things like robustness or usability get short shrift because so much of the focus is on efficiency. Hundreds of papers have been written about the bandwidth-efficiency of various P2P networks - especially Gnutella, which everyone who knows anything knows is "worst of breed" when it comes to broadcasting searches.
It's unfortunate that the most popular P2P networks seem to be the least efficient ones, and doubly unfortunate that so many vendors bundle spyware with their P2P clients, but to say that P2P developers don't give much thought to efficiency is absurd. They give a lot more thought to efficiency than Slashdot editors give to accuracy, that's for damn sure.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
that it's not the movies as much as the protocol.
I bet that running a ftp server that has the same content will result in less traffic even if the movie is downloaded more often. Why? Because of the crosstalk inherit in the p2p protocols.
Yes, but there is a tradeoff between spatial efficiency and computational efficiency.
Imagine 100 clients (at 5K/s) connecting within 10 seconds of each other to retrieve an 10K document. Simplifying, and assuming that the server has enough bandwidth to sustain ~550K/s outbound traffic, this means it will take the server approximately 12 seconds to service these requests.
Now imagine the same 100 clients requesting a compressed version of the same document, and assume that the server has to perform the compression on-the-fly. Say that it nominally takes 0.2 seconds to compress the 10K document. For the sake of the argument lets assume that the compression is so good that the time it takes to transfer the compressed data drops to almost zero.
So how does this perform? Consider the following simplified version of events: in the first second, the server receives 10 requests and starts 10 compression processes. Each individual compression process then runs at 1/10th of nominal speed, which means it takes 2 full seconds for the server to respond. But in those 2 seconds, an additional 20 requests come in. And now compression runs at 1/30th of nominal speed. But still requests are coming in, and very quickly, the system becomes completely overwhelmed.
It is instructive to take a moment and consider your mention of specialized compression hardware. A number of network cards do indeed already contain special hardware to e.g. offload checksum calculation from the main CPU. Adding compression hardware is not a farfetched idea.
As a rule however, commoditized general purpose CPUs such as x86, through economies of scale and fierce competition, tend to overtake specialized hardware in a relatively short amount of time. In other words, the fancy compression hardware that you buy today for $5000, may be unable to keep up with the amount of data that your $1000 CPU of next year can throw at it. In this contrived example the only way to justify the added cost is when the bandwidth savings amount to at least $4000: i.e. not bloody likely, given that a lot of the data transferred today (images, video, audio) is already compressed/does not compress all that well.
It all comes down to the question whether paying for bandwidth is cheaper than paying for processing power. At some time in the past both processing power and bandwidth were outrageously expensive. Now both are incredibly cheap.
With developments in processor technology still proceeding at the pace of Moore's law and the telecom industry still reeling from the X.25 fiasco and the blow dealt to them by Internet technology, however, I think we can expect the balance to tip over in favor of processing power over the next decade. It already has, to some extent, in the form of increasingly powerful (and increasingly CPU hungry) compression algorithms, and increasingly expensive forms of bandwidth, such as wireless (with correspondingly byzantine service conditions, just the way the telcoms like it). But the real bandwidth revolution (metered access?) is I think still some way off.
Dude, you were running a rogue DHCP? That'll get you banned from the network for the whole year at my school! Heck, the guy that lived in my dorm room before me did it and I had to talk with the network support for days just to get them to re-enable my jack after I moved in.
Obviously the person who submitted the story doesn't know what he is talking about.
Efficiency is a major focus of large P2P apps. When you are making hundreds of connections, you need to be efficient, or it won't work worth a damn. Coming up with an efficient enough algorithm is probably the hardest part!
As far as using up international bandwidth, the reason it is so expensive in the first place is because not enough of it is used. Telling people not to use more of it is saying that it should always remain expensive.
The story submitter is totally off-base.