[42502] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: What Worked - What Didn't
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Patrick W. Gilmore)
Mon Sep 17 14:17:54 2001
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20010917140737.02d0a000@127.0.0.1>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 14:16:00 -0400
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <NDBBKECCEHKIHGIMJECAMEAHCLAA.vivienm@dyndns.org>
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At 01:57 PM 9/17/2001 -0400, Vivien M. wrote:
>Washingtonpost.com kept alternating between Akamaized and not Akamaized in
>my experience; I'm guessing that it takes some time for content to replicate
>across Akamai servers, so in the meantime they put the new content up
>locally, and once it was on all the Akamai servers changed their links to
>the Akamaized URL. For some reason though, it seemed that _all_ the links
>changed from Akamaized or not Akamaized and back and so on, and not just the
>new ones. It made for a rather ... odd situation.
The customer controls whether an image, site, stream, or anything else is
"Akamaized". And content is not replicated to any Akamai server until an
end user "mapped" to that server requests it.
So, when a customer changes from a standard URL to an Akamized URL, there
is no wait time for the data to be pushed to all servers. The very first
user asking for that content will be mapped to the nearest Akamai server,
which will then pull the data down and give it to the user, saving a copy
on its HD. Subsequent users will get the data directly from the hard drive.
This is a strictly technical post on how Akamai works. Akamai has
absolutely no control over whether a content provider uses Akamai's system
to distribute all, some, or none of their content.
>Vivien
--
TTFN,
patrick
