Re: NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study

["Mark Delany" <k3f () november emu st>]

On 03Jan21, Brandon Martin allegedly wrote:
> I was thinking more in the original context of this thread w.r.t. 
> potential distribution of emergency alerts.  That could, if 
> semi-centralized, easily result in 100s of million connections to juggle 
> across a single service just for the USA.  While it presumably wouldn't 
> be quite that centralized, it's a sizable problem to manage.

Indeed. But how do you know the clients are still connected? And if they aren't, there is
not much a server can do beyond discarding the state. Presumably the client would need to
run a fairly frequent keep-a-live/reconnect strategy to ensure the connection is still
functioning.

Which raises the question: how long a delay do you tolerate for an emergency alert? I
think the end result is a lot of active connections and keep-a-live traffic. Not really
quiescent at all. In the end, probably just as cheap to poll a CDN.


Mark.