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Researchers Map Locations of 4,669 Servers In Netflix's Content Delivery Network (ieee.org)
Wave723 writes from a report via IEEE Spectrum: For the first time, a team of researchers has mapped the entire content delivery network that brings Netflix to the world, including the number and location of every server that the company uses to distribute its films. They also independently analyzed traffic volumes handled by each of those servers. Their work allows experts to compare Netflix's distribution approach to those of other content-rich companies such as Google, Akamai and Limelight. To do this, IEEE Spectrum reports that the group reverse-engineered Netflix's domain name system for the company's servers, and then created a crawler that used publicly available information to find every possible server name within its network through the common address nflxvideo.net. In doing so, they were able to determine the total number of servers the company uses, where those servers are located, and whether the servers were housed within internet exchange points or with internet service providers, revealing stark differences in Netflix's strategy between countries. One of their most interesting findings was that two Netflix servers appear to be deployed within Verizon's U.S. network, which one researcher speculates could indicate that the companies are pursuing an early pilot or trial.
The BitTorrent approach is the wrong one for two reasons:
1. A lot of people have asymmetrical connections with a very slow upload speed
2. A lot of people have monthly data caps with hefty fees for going over
Wait, are you saying that information like the server load distribution of a real world system like Netflix isn't useful to studying such systems and designing future ones? There aren't that many systems like this in the wild, and most of them don't release their information publicly, so getting an extra example could be quite useful. If they didn't have this, many of the people complaining here would then instead be complaining about academics who ignore real world systems in their studies. It is not unlike a lot of research work that is done to characterize various products that the manufacturer doesn't provide enough info for, whether the latest cpu performance in a real world test to benchmarking networking gear or detailing the performance of some new high speed camera, etc.