What Worked - What Didn't

Mon Sep 17 18:16:00 UTC 2001

At 01:57 PM 9/17/2001 -0400, Vivien M. wrote:

 >Washingtonpost.com kept alternating between Akamaized and not Akamaized in
 >my experience; I'm guessing that it takes some time for content to replicate
 >across Akamai servers, so in the meantime they put the new content up
 >locally, and once it was on all the Akamai servers changed their links to
 >the Akamaized URL. For some reason though, it seemed that _all_ the links
 >changed from Akamaized or not Akamaized and back and so on, and not just the
 >new ones. It made for a rather ... odd situation.

The customer controls whether an image, site, stream, or anything else is 
"Akamaized".  And content is not replicated to any Akamai server until an 
end user "mapped" to that server requests it.

So, when a customer changes from a standard URL to an Akamized URL, there 
is no wait time for the data to be pushed to all servers.  The very first 
user asking for that content will be mapped to the nearest Akamai server, 
which will then pull the data down and give it to the user, saving a copy 
on its HD.  Subsequent users will get the data directly from the hard drive.

This is a strictly technical post on how Akamai works.  Akamai has 
absolutely no control over whether a content provider uses Akamai's system 
to distribute all, some, or none of their content.

 >Vivien

--
TTFN,
patrick