On Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 12:56:25PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: > * Wayne E. Bouchard: > > > the users will screw themselves by flooding their uplinks in which > > case they will know what they've done to themselves and will largely > > accept the problems for the durration > > With shared media networks (or insufficient backhaul capacities), > congestion affects more than just the customer causing it.
Okay, so to state the obvious for those who missed the point... The congestion will either be directly in front of user because they're flooding their uplink or towards the destination (beit a single central network or a set of storage clusters housed at, say, 6 different locations off 3 different providers.) It is very hard, in my experience, for something like this to congest the general network. The congestion occurs where either bandwidth drops off--such as with the edge dialup, DSL, or cable modem link--or traffic concentrates. Just like someone broadcasting a concert. Either you as a user can't receive the feed because your pipe isn't big enough for the stream or the network/servers sourcing the traffic get bogged down and, generally, the rest of the folks out there not watching the feed don't know there's a problem. If you're not participating in that traffic, the likelihood that you'll be impacted by it drops off dramatically. Yes, the PTP model will behave a little differently but in that case, you're more likely to see individual users having issues (either hosts or clients) rather than everyone as a whole and it *still* won't impact the broader network. The more "central clusters" you add, the more the traffic pattern will start to behave like the PTP scenario and the lower the probabilty of broad impact. My point was simply that if you think it through, there really isn't any reason to be concerned about it. (It can't be any worse than the Jackson verdict or the Pope and, as far as I recall, since we're all still here, I don't believe the world ended when those events happened.) -Wayne --- Wayne Bouchard w...@typo.org Network Dude http://www.typo.org/~web/
