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RE: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?

  • From: Bill Nash
  • Date: Wed Jan 09 17:15:50 2008


On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:

I actually speak for an ISP, not an enterprise at this time -- my apologies
for not making it more clear.  When I said "our network" I was really
referring to our residential and business broadband subscribers.  Among our
business subscribers, only a handful actually have SUS in place.


Even so, as mentioned in another piece of the thread, in combination with the timing spread for the update download, and the comparitive size of some of the updates compared to other content, I think you'll notice Xbox/Wii updates, Ron Paul spam, and Bittorrent releases more than you'll notice MSFT patches.

- billn


Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Nash [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 3:36 PM
To: Frank Bulk
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:


Every month I look at my upstream bandwidth graphs and I see no blip in
the
hours before 3 am on Microsoft's Black Tuesday. I would think that with
the 
thousands of PCs out on our network downloading updates around that time
that I would see *something*.  I know every Black Tuesday I see my three
PC's blinking a logon screen.

Are MSFT's monthly updates really a non-event in regards to internet
bandwidth?


Users are too far from the firehose to feel the more interesting effects.
That said, it's hit or miss, from month to month. If you have peering to a
CDN network (llnw, akam, etc), you'll certainly see Patch Day roll
through, since you're sitting on the aggregation of a large flow of data.
As an end user, especially in an enterprise with admin's that are worth
anything, you're not talking about a massive amount of data, in many
cases. Service packs, sure, those are generally a bit bigger, but hotfixes
and the like, usually pretty small. I don't even notice patches on my home
connection, since they're a drop in the bucket compared to all the other
content rolling around. Youtube and similar content flows are more
noticeable.

I think the only enterprise users who would notice a large influx of
data are the ones who don't run caches.

- billn