Elephant in the room - Akamai

Thu Dec 5 22:18:07 UTC 2019

On 12/5/19 1:44 PM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Dec 2019 14:41:30 -0600, "Aaron Gould" said:
>
>> Tarko. wow, gaming again !  It's not going away. gaming traffic is growing
>> in a big way it seems.
> And it's only going to get worse.  Sony has already announced that the
> Playstation 5 will have a (probably) 1-2 terabyte SSD.  And even with that, the
> game packaging is set up to support only downloading the single-player or
> multi-player portions of a game because images are going to be pushing 100
> gigabytes RSN (some are already well over 40gig).
>
> So even with the download restructuring, we're probably going to be seeing a
> lot of people downloading lots of gigabytes on Day 1 (or a few days before, for
> games that support it), and re-downloading smaller (but still large) amounts
> when they want to re-play the game...
>

I suspect that it's going to be even worse on the home side. A while ago 
a friend was here and unbeknownst to me, he was downloading a big game. 
The rest of the home network was rendered unusable, and it took me over 
an hour to figure out what was going on. I knew what to look for -- and 
even then giving the awful tools that routers support it was hard -- but 
just about anybody else would have been on the phone to their provider 
saying that "INTERTOOBS ARE SLOW!".

My suspicion is that the root problem was buffer bloat -- i flashed a 
new router with openwrt and was a little dismayed that the bufferbloat 
code is a plugin you have to enable. The buffer bloat got a lot better 
after that, but I forgot to retest the downloading after so I'm not 100% 
positive. But if it was the problem, we're probably in for a world of 
hurt as I doubt that many home routers implement it.

Mike