nanog mailing list archives

Re: Elephant in the room - Akamai


From: Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2019 14:18:07 -0800


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


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