Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?

Bill Nash billn at billn.net
Wed Jan 9 21:53:31 UTC 2008



On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:

> I actually speak for an ISP, not an enterprise at this time -- my apologies
> for not making it more clear.  When I said "our network" I was really
> referring to our residential and business broadband subscribers.  Among our
> business subscribers, only a handful actually have SUS in place.
>

Even so, as mentioned in another piece of the thread, in combination with 
the timing spread for the update download, and the comparitive size of 
some of the updates compared to other content, I think you'll notice 
Xbox/Wii updates, Ron Paul spam, and Bittorrent releases more than you'll 
notice MSFT patches.

- billn


> Frank
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Nash [mailto:billn at billn.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 3:36 PM
> To: Frank Bulk
> Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?
>
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
>
>>
>> Every month I look at my upstream bandwidth graphs and I see no blip in
> the
>> hours before 3 am on Microsoft's Black Tuesday.  I would think that with
> the
>> thousands of PCs out on our network downloading updates around that time
>> that I would see *something*.  I know every Black Tuesday I see my three
>> PC's blinking a logon screen.
>>
>> Are MSFT's monthly updates really a non-event in regards to internet
>> bandwidth?
>>
>
> Users are too far from the firehose to feel the more interesting effects.
> That said, it's hit or miss, from month to month. If you have peering to a
> CDN network (llnw, akam, etc), you'll certainly see Patch Day roll
> through, since you're sitting on the aggregation of a large flow of data.
> As an end user, especially in an enterprise with admin's that are worth
> anything, you're not talking about a massive amount of data, in many
> cases. Service packs, sure, those are generally a bit bigger, but hotfixes
> and the like, usually pretty small. I don't even notice patches on my home
> connection, since they're a drop in the bucket compared to all the other
> content rolling around. Youtube and similar content flows are more
> noticeable.
>
> I think the only enterprise users who would notice a large influx of
> data are the ones who don't run caches.
>
> - billn
>



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