akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Wed Feb 12 16:13:33 UTC 2020

On 2/12/20 10:59 AM, Dave Bell wrote:
> Night-time for you is daytime for someone else.

This is very true, though I am curious what the international 
demographics are like for COD in particular and many games in general. 
I suspect a lot of them are at least somewhat regional.

> I agree that the folks pushing these massive data loads could be 
> considerate of the networks they are running on. The steam preload thing 
> is a great example. The content becomes available x weeks before launch 
> and downloaded to your device at some point in that window. It then 
> simply unlocked on launch day.

This works really, really well from what I can see.  I don't even see 
many major OS updates, new game drops, etc. in my stats.  One of my 
networks is too small and hence noisy to really tell, but the other is 
quite predictable.

> I'm not sure how much incentive there is for people to implement this 
> kind of system though. With the rise of CDN and global caching, people 
> care less about the performance of their servers for content 
> distribution as it just scales out.

It would be really nice if the major CDNs had virtual machines small 
network operators with very expensive regional transport costs could 
spin up.  Hit rate would be very low, of course, but the ability to grab 
some of these mass-market huge updates and serve them on the other end 
of the regional transport at essentially no extra cost would be great. 
I'm sure legal arrangements make that difficult, though.
-- 
Brandon Martin