Re: maximum visits to a web site or page at same time
- From: William Gill <noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:42:30 -0400
cwdjrxyz wrote:
I get up to a maximum number of GB of bandwidth per month. If that is
exceeded, I will get charged for the excess bandwidth at the end of
the month. ...
Bandwidth is an old analog term. In general it refers to how much spectrum is used/available, and thus the capacity. The term did not port well to the digital world, because its use introduced too much ambiguity. i.e. 1000 Khz means 1,000,000 full cycles every second. Seconds are the agreed to standard interval or period. You won't see cycles per week, cycles per hour, or anything else. When a hosting service uses "bandwidth" to mean how many gigabits per month, he/she may be using a "pipe" that only works at 45 megabits per second to connect to the internet at large. That "pipe" is shared by all his/her customers. When he/she tries to feed more bits than that, the excess is queued or dropped.
... They download part of the data at a time, The time between
download "spurts" becomes longer and longer as more and more people
are using the server.
Well... Sometimes the "spurts" are the result of requests being queued or the bursty "packet" nature of TCP/IP ("data" is broken up; put into packets numbered; sent; received; resequenced if necessary; and reassembled).
... This situation will not do for a busy streaming media
site, such as a web radio or TV station. A certain minimum download
rate is required to keep the media streaming. Thus a special media
server often is set up to limit the number of people viewing it at one
time. When that limit is exceeded, no one else can get on until some
people sign out. Typically when too busy, you get a message that the
service is too busy to use.
The media is always streaming. The question is; is it streaming efficiently enough.
To prevent the interval between packets in any source/destination stream from being intolerable to a specific "service", it is necessary to have faster "pipes", faster "pumps" (servers), and/or fewer recipients. Also keep in mind that the "last mile" (the part between the net and the recipient) is probably the biggest choke point (the slowest). In the old telephone world echo was not a problem on shorter connections, because even if the echo was "relatively loud", it was happening almost in sync with what it was echoing, so the brain didn't notice. On longer calls the delay made the echo separate itself in time from the original (delay). We couldn't fix the time delay, but we could suppress the volume of the echo in an effort to keep the brain happy. A non-technical example is a Casino. The dealer(server) can only deal cards (packets) so fast, the table can only be so small (faster delivery), but some players won't be happy if they are losing their money too slowly. So we limit the number of seats at the table (limit the delay between cards/packets) so that the dealer can get that unhappy player his/her next card faster.
<disclaimer> all of this may not hold up to intense technical scrutiny, but it's close enough for government work. Anyway, I think it's way beyond the scope of this group</disclaimer>
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- From: fulio pen
- Re: maximum visits to a web site or page at same time
- From: William Gill
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- From: cwdjrxyz
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