akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Thu Jan 23 22:56:06 UTC 2020

On Thu, 23 Jan 2020, Tom Deligiannis wrote:

> In this scenario, which mechanism controls the download speed? I hear many users complain that their gigabit
> internet connection is not maxing out and the update is taking forever. I would never expect a gigabit internet
> connection to be saturated during a game update, but I'm curious how the throttling works.

Speaking from my CDN and service provider hats, I'd say upstream 
congestion.  If you're an end user with a gigabit internet connection, on 
a service that presumably has lots of customers with similarly large 
connections, it's a safe bet nothing upstream of you is provisioned with 
enough capacity to serve everyone running full speed.  Whether it's 
peering with the CDN, backhaul on your provider's network from the peering 
point to whereever you are, etc.  Something, or multiple something's, will 
run out of pipe in a traffic event like yesterday's.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
  StackPath, Sr. Neteng       |  therefore you are
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________