"IP networks will feel traffic pain in 2009" (C|Net & Cisco)

Wed Jan 21 00:40:11 UTC 2009

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:

> Define "cached".
> 
> For instance, most of the video today (which apparently had 12 zeros  
> in the bits per second number) was "cached", if you ask the CDNs  
> serving it.
> 
> Sounds to me like that is significant, no matter how big your network  
> is.

If, for example, Google's current generation of YouTube content serving
wasn't 100% uncachable by design, Squid caches would probably be
saving a stupid amount of bandwidth for those of you who are using it.

People rolling Squid + 'magic adrian rules to rewrite Youtube URLs
so they don't suck' report upwards of 80% byte hit rates on -just-
the Youtube content,  because people view the same bloody popular
videos over and over again. Thats 80% of a couple hundred megabits
for a couple groups in Brazil, and that translates to mega dollars
to them.

There's no reason to doubt this wouldn't be the case even in Europe
and North America for forward caches put in exactly the right spot
to see exactly the right number of people.

I tried talking to Google about this. Those I spoke to went from
enthusiastic one month to "sorry, been told this won't happen!"
the next month. Which is sad really; the people who keep coming
to me and asking about caching all those things you funny CDNs are
pushing out are those who are on things like satellite links, or
in eastern europe / south america, where the -infrastructure-
is still lacking. They're the ones blocking facebook, youtube,
etc, because of the amount of bandwidth used by just those sites. :)

Adrian

(And I know about the various generations of Google content boxes out there
and have heard stories from people who have and are trialling them.
Thats great if you're a service provider, and sucks if you're not well
connected to a service provider. Like, say, schools in Australia trying
to run a class with 30-40 odd computers hitting Google maps at once.
tsk.)