[101535] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Nash)
Wed Jan 9 16:54:50 2008
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2008 14:35:58 -0700 (MST)
From: Bill Nash <billn@billn.net>
To: Frank Bulk <frnkblk@iname.com>
cc: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <!&!AAAAAAAAAAAuAAAAAAAAAKTyXRN5/+lGvU59a+P7CFMBAN6gY+ZG84BMpVQcAbDh1IQAAAATbSgAABAAAAD3lvs27sAAQoLFUKme+xdpAQAAAAA=@iname.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
>
> Every month I look at my upstream bandwidth graphs and I see no blip in the
> hours before 3 am on Microsoft's Black Tuesday. I would think that with the
> thousands of PCs out on our network downloading updates around that time
> that I would see *something*. I know every Black Tuesday I see my three
> PC's blinking a logon screen.
>
> Are MSFT's monthly updates really a non-event in regards to internet
> bandwidth?
>
Users are too far from the firehose to feel the more interesting effects.
That said, it's hit or miss, from month to month. If you have peering to a
CDN network (llnw, akam, etc), you'll certainly see Patch Day roll
through, since you're sitting on the aggregation of a large flow of data.
As an end user, especially in an enterprise with admin's that are worth
anything, you're not talking about a massive amount of data, in many
cases. Service packs, sure, those are generally a bit bigger, but hotfixes
and the like, usually pretty small. I don't even notice patches on my home
connection, since they're a drop in the bucket compared to all the other
content rolling around. Youtube and similar content flows are more
noticeable.
I think the only enterprise users who would notice a large influx of
data are the ones who don't run caches.
- billn
