Slashdot Mirror
Why the Olympics Didn't Melt the Internet
perlow tips his blog entry over at ZDNet on why the Internet didn't melt when millions of users streamed 480i video for a week. The short answer is Limelight Networks of Tempe, Arizona. "[W]hy the Internet didn't 'melt' is quite simple — [Limelight is] completely 'off the cloud.' In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn't deployed over the public Internet... Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."
don't worry, you can still watch the highlights or if you're in the USA they're here
OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
... resolves them as a "hostile" IP range. How interesting and (Alanis) ironic; someone that PGLabs views as "hostile" managed to distribute a high content of data seamlessly over the internet.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
good point! silverlight is an abomination, but one which will certainly die out over time. (IMO, of course)
They may be more popular outside the USA, but here in the States, no one is watching and no one cares. This isn't much different than the last Olympics...or the next one, for that matter.
We have a ton of sports - the NFL, the NBA, baseball, NHL - and those are just the big four. The idea of tuning in the Olympics just to watch American basketball players play...well, I can do that every night of the week for months.
Personally, I'd watch if they put fencing, judo, etc. on...but baseball? Yawn...I could watch the best players in the world every night for six months if I cared.
Advice: on VPS providers
1. Timezones: The majority of content was encoded outside of the timezone for North America where the traffic was targeted so there was a huge opportunity to store and forward the content, in this case on limelight although it could have been handled by any of the major CDNs such as Akamai or Highwinds
2. I think there was a lot of last second optimizations done at the ISPs to make sure that fingers didn't point at them.
the original article was really speaking to the live streams which cannot be cached beyond a few seconds. Lets pull up the statistics.
http://nbcumv.com/release_detail.nbc/sports-20080814000000-olympicsontrackto.html
22 million streams served, 4 million of which were live streams, and additional 3 million stream served via the mobile platform and other VOD outlets.
Its going to break a lot of records. But i think that the original article and the OP here missed the point totally. If an event of this magnitude can go off with hardly a hitch, then why is it exactly that we need (the ISPs need) traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, and throttling? The ISPs among others have been saying for years that the internet is going to melt under the load of video, and using it as an excuse to add these technologies. The article on ZDnet asks the question.. is it really and we will find out in a few days (article was prior to the olympics). The real question remains that if 22 million videos at an average of 20 minutes per video and an average bitrate of 700kb weren't enough (3.5Million hours of content) in ADDITION to whatever people are doing everyday then 'why do we need traffic shaping and bandwidth management?'
The US Open was more popular on our Network than the Olympics. Of course, we figured out how to block Limelight after the USOpen so that helped too.. They make it almost impossible to simply QoS them because of this infrastructure.
Don't use MS office then either? But what could you replace Excel with?
Open office is still a ways to offering me the features I need. And these features were available in Excel 2003, probably even as far back as 97, and they had that sweet flightsim in 97 too ;)
So what should I use instead of Silverlight? Flash?
I'll be honest, at this point, I'd rather have silverlight.
At least then I won't have to look forward to months of non-support for something as passe as 64 bit processors.
We all know that's never going to fly.
Ever since then, I've had nothing but utter disdain for Flash, whether from Macromedia or now at Adobe. When you're that stupid, you won't be getting a smidgen of respect until you earn it.
You've been outed already.
But the major events, the ones that generate huge advertising revenue in the US, are still not streamed, in full or live. That includes gymnastics, women's beach volleyball (man's favorite spectator sport?), swimming (unless you count -- gag! -- synchronized swimming, but most slashdotters probably don't consider that a real sport anyways) and most of the track and field events. They've got some select stuff up once it's already happened, like after Michael Phelps already got his golds, but it's not live. Still, I'm kind of surprised that most of the basketball games are streamed -- you would think they'd want those television ad dollars, too?
While you're at it, why not divide a nation's medal "points" by the nation's population, to really make things fair. Points per capita.
But I got a better idea - how about no point system at all? Which is what they have now. This isn't like a high school or college track meet where points are totaled to determine which side won the meet. It looks like China will win the most gold medals and most medals over all, but there won't be any official statement that "China won the Olympics". The medal count has no formal place in the rules, nor should it. It's just an informal stat that may or may not be interesting for fans to talk about. Bringing in a complicated system to formalize the medal count (or medal "points") into something that's officially meaningful would be pretty lame.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000