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0 pointssliverstorm11y ago0 comments

I am not talking about imbalance in U/D, but rather imbalance in destination (or source). If tremendous amounts of traffic is going to or from just a small handful of nodes, you need tremendous routers & pipes going to those nodes.

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pdonis11y ago

> just a small handful of nodes

But Netflix is not "just a small number of nodes". They're basically their own CDN; they have servers all over the Internet, precisely in order to not have the problem you describe.

What's more, Comcast has a deal with Netflix to directly connect Netflix nodes to Comcast's network; in other words, Comcast directly controls how many paths there are for Netflix content to get into its network. If there aren't enough such paths, they can just open up more.

tacticus11y ago

Thankfully netflix expose their stuff via bgp (as well as other nice things) so you can have multiple paths into their network (and out of yours) without any single giant router. allowing you to balance your traffic.

You can even ask them for a freeish box to run inside your network to reduce requests to their CDNs

icambron11y ago

Oops, my bad. Rewrote my response.

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