[165843] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: iOS 7 update traffic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Mon Sep 23 10:08:24 2013
From: Joe Abley <jabley@hopcount.ca>
In-Reply-To: <CAPLq3UPW9JXYNDAZME0YNtYfmAu-eY6QM8OrT2TjDbvAOJ5OZg@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:02:09 -0400
To: Glen Kent <glen.kent@gmail.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 2013-09-23, at 09:41, Glen Kent <glen.kent@gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW Linux distributions are available to download via bittorrent, so =
we
> dont really need Akamai/Limelight here. Is there a reason why Apple =
has not
> adopted bit-torrent for distribution? Are there legal/commercial
> implications using bit-torrent?
There are upstream congestion issues frequently associated with =
bittorrent. If you compare
(a) five thousand students on a campus wifi network trying to download a =
1GB image from a nearby Akamai cache, and
(b) five thousand students on a campus wifi network seeding a 1GB image =
to people all over the world
it's not obvious that more pain results from (a) than (b).
Even given the ability of Apple to control the behaviour of the =
bittorrent agent (which presumably would be built into iOS) the impact =
of such a strategy on an event of this size seems very hard to predict, =
given a narrow time base and an unknowable number of local network =
constraints.
It doesn't seem impossible to try and optimise the fan-out by giving =
network operators hooks to influence peer selection based on local =
topology. But it also doesn't sound like an easy general problem to =
solve (or a problem that anybody necessarily wants to spend money on if =
the relief is only going to be felt once per year on major iOS updates).
(Remember as well that the scale here is very different. With iOS, Apple =
is the major Unix vendor on the planet by some margin. No other single =
Linux or other Unix/Unix-like distribution comes close, and I am =
guessing no single operating system triggers the update enthusiasm =
observed with iOS.)
Joe
