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by film42 4225 days ago
So if Netflix makes up 9.48% of upstream and 32.39% of downstream, that means for each 10 packets sent, 3 ACK packets are sent back (I know those figures don't represent raw traffic). Does that seem a little odd? I'm not asking as a basis for some conspiracy, I'm more so wondering what that implies for data services I'm working on.
2 comments
PeterisP 4225 days ago
Your math would be meaningful if the total upstream volume would be the same as downstream volume, which is very much not the case. The percentages mostly depend on how much upstream traffic is (or isn't) generated by other sources.
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film42 4225 days ago
True, and I noted that, but it does represent a ratio which can be used to compare against other sites on that list, like YouTube.
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notatoad 4225 days ago
no, it just means that you don't have to upload a whole lot of stuff to become 10% of upstream traffic.
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clhodapp 4225 days ago
That doesn't make sense; There isn't one pool of "upload" data and another of "download" data. Rather, there is one pool of data streaming from edges into the core (upload) and back out again (download). You can either attribute each chunk of data to its uploader or to its downloader, but in either case, the pool is the same size.

Edit: or these metrics don't mean what I think they mean, in which case, please tell me!

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notatoad 4225 days ago
From my understanding of the source article, these traffic numbers don't count servers. It's just the traffic of residential ISP customers.
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film42 4225 days ago
It just seems weird that YouTube is further down that list, yet YouTube is a video hosting service.
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nacs 4225 days ago
Youtube has far shorter videos (5-15 minutes on average), defaults to 480p or less most of the time and the visitor session length is much less than the average Netflix stream.

Netflix is doing 720p / 1080p defaults on most players, 1 hour to who-knows-how-long non-stop sessions (I personally have binge-watched like half a season of TV shows in one sitting occasionally) and gets daily recurring traffic from multiple members per household.

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film42 4225 days ago
Right, what I meant though was YouTube let's anyone upload videos. That ingestion must account for a lot more than Netflix's TCP ACKs considering 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

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