CDN Overload?

Blake Hudson blake at ispn.net
Wed Sep 28 15:59:51 UTC 2016


Mike, you might want to reference this thread - 
http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/thread.html#87147 - 
as another data point. LLNW was sending data at levels ~ 10x greater 
than my policed DSL user's subscription rates. It seems to me that 
either the client or the server TCP stack was not working in a desirable 
manner.

--Blake

Mike Hammett wrote on 9/19/2016 12:34 PM:
> I participate on a few other mailing lists focused on eyeball networks. For a couple years I've been hearing complaints from this CDN or that CDN was behaving badly. It's been severely ramping up the past few months. There have been some wild allegations, but I would like to develop a bit more standardized evidence collection. Initially LimeLight was the only culprit, but recently it has been Microsoft as well. I'm not sure if there have been any others.
>
> The principal complaint is that upstream of whatever is doing the rate limiting for a given customer there is significantly more capacity being utilized than the customer has purchased. This could happen briefly as TCP adjusts to the capacity limitation, but in some situations this has persisted for days at a time. I'll list out a few situations as best as I can recall them. Some of these may even be merges of a couple situations. The point is to show the general issue and develop a better process for collecting what exactly is happening at the time and how to address it.
>
> One situation had approximately 45 megabit/s of capacity being used up by a customer that had a 1.5 megabit/s plan. All other traffic normally held itself within the 1.5 megabit/s, but this particular CDN sent excessively more for extended periods of time.
>
> An often occurrence has someone with a single digit megabit/s limitation consuming 2x - 3x more than their plan on the other side of the rate limiter.
>
> Last month on my own network I saw someone with 2x - 3x being consumed upstream and they had *190* connections downloading said data from Microsoft.
>
> The past week or two I've been hearing of people only having a single connection downloading at more than their plan rate.
>
>
> These situations effectively shut out all other Internet traffic to that customer or even portion of the network for low capacity NLOS areas. It's a DoS caused by downloads. What happened to the days of MS BITS and you didn't even notice the download happening? A lot of these guys think that the CDNs are just a pile of dicks looking to ruin everyone's day and I'm certain that there are at least a couple people at each CDN that aren't that way. ;-)
>
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>
> Lots of rambling, sure. What do I need to have these guys collect as evidence of a problem and who should they send it to?
>
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> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions
>
> Midwest Internet Exchange
>
> The Brothers WISP
>




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