Google, Facebook, YouTube access through local bandwidth

[rpm]

Google, Facebook, YouTube all local

Various popular international websites, including Google, YouTube and Facebook, now have a local presence

 

[cookiemonster]

With locally hosted content the network provider saves on expensive international bandwidth ...

Err... I thought it was much more expensive to host locally? :wtf:

 

[killerbyte]

financially it makes sense for the ISPs to provide free hosting. It reduces their clients' usage of international bandwidth.

 

[RoganDawes]

Err... I thought it was much more expensive to host locally? :wtf:

Not if you are only providing bandwidth to your own clients. Typically, the DNS only points your own clients to your hosted CDN servers (although we have seen that it is possible to access them by hard coding the IP addresses in your hosts file).

There are two main costs for an ISP:
* Upstream costs (getting traffic from wherever it is served to their local ISP network)
* IPC costs (getting traffic from their ISP network to their clients)

By hosting a cache server on your own network, you only pay that upstream cost once, rather than every time one of your customers requests it.

 

[HavocXphere]

Facebook isn't 100% local. Some photos don't load on local.

 

[sparticus]

metacafe has been local for years now , glad to see other joining in , re facebook I noticed a while back they you must be logged in to access via local , you could not log in locally but if you stayed logged in then it would work even if you close your browser. Is this still the case ?

 

[Wall]

Does this mean that when your international cap is finished you can still access www.youtube.com / www.google.co.za / www.facebook.com via your local bandwidth?

 

[Tinuva]

What the article could mention as well is that you actually need to use your ISP's DNS servers instead of Google's 8.8.8.8 and OpenDNS otherwise you don't get these benefits. Reason being thats the only way these networks can pinpoint your network's location and send the user to the server closest to them.

 

[LazyLion]

This would have excited me aout two years ago... back when local was a big deal.

These days it is only relevant when an international cable goes down.

 

[Chevron]

This would have excited me aout two years ago... back when local was a big deal.

These days it is only relevant when an international cable goes down.

Most people use their isp dns servers.

What the article could mention as well is that you actually need to use your ISP's DNS servers instead of Google's 8.8.8.8 and OpenDNS otherwise you don't get these benefits. Reason being thats the only way these networks can pinpoint your network's location and send the user to the server closest to them.

Was thinking the same thing.

Everyone should be on uncapped by now.

 

[viper2110]

If you are using Firefox u can install the flagfox addon. It will show you where the server is located.

 

[Dan C]

This would have excited me aout two years ago... back when local was a big deal.

These days it is only relevant when an international cable goes down.

What's local only bandwidth, remind me again

 

[Mantis]

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?242316-Forcing-Google-Services-to-local-(RSA)-IP-address

 

[Knersus]

I wonder about the technicalities of this for something like Facebook - I don't think everything comes from the local servers, because imagine one of your friends in London does a status update, and you refresh the page and it shows the status update occurred lets say 1 minute ago... I doubt that the entire FB DB is sync'ed every minute, yet the page that you are seeing shows very recent data.

And either way that is a crap load of data to be sync'ed to local servers for google, youtube, etc.. I know it's better to do it once than for every user, but still it's an interesting concept and being in IT architecture myself it makes me curious about the details of how it all works.

 

[Tinuva]

I wonder about the technicalities of this for something like Facebook - I don't think everything comes from the local servers, because imagine one of your friends in London does a status update, and you refresh the page and it shows the status update occurred lets say 1 minute ago... I doubt that the entire FB DB is sync'ed every minute, yet the page that you are seeing shows very recent data.

And either way that is a crap load of data to be sync'ed to local servers for google, youtube, etc.. I know it's better to do it once than for every user, but still it's an interesting concept and being in IT architecture myself it makes me curious about the details of how it all works.

Facebook uses what you call, db caching servers, which uses memory to hold data. It is way more complex that what I am describing but instead of doing a lot of mysql db reads they mostly only write to them unless a caching server reboots it will rebuild its data back from the mysql backend servers. This causes a lot less load on them as well as spreading and duplicating it over multiple servers in memory makes the whole process faster for users and servers. I believe the specific product they use for this is memcached if you want to read up on that. Obviously they do the same for the webpages as well.

However most things facebook are not replicated all over the world, they typically will have 3 data centres in different locations that have the web servers and web caching servers as well as with the mysql and memcached servers. The only thing that is local is Akamai, which is a CDN and most of the time this only serves static content, ala pictures, javascript, stylesheets ect, the dynamic content will still go international regardless.

 

[Johnfpro]

If you are using Firefox u can install the flagfox addon. It will show you where the server is located.

Yes, the addon works very well

 

[root01]

What the article could mention as well is that you actually need to use your ISP's DNS servers instead of Google's 8.8.8.8 and OpenDNS otherwise you don't get these benefits. Reason being thats the only way these networks can pinpoint your network's location and send the user to the server closest to them.

True that.

 

[LazyLion]

Facebook has over 60,000 servers. I doubt that all of them are mirrored locally!

 

[murraybiscuit]

Facebook uses what you call, db caching servers, which uses memory to hold data. It is way more complex that what I am describing but instead of doing a lot of mysql db reads they mostly only write to them unless a caching server reboots it will rebuild its data back from the mysql backend servers. This causes a lot less load on them as well as spreading and duplicating it over multiple servers in memory makes the whole process faster for users and servers. I believe the specific product they use for this is memcached if you want to read up on that. Obviously they do the same for the webpages as well.

However most things facebook are not replicated all over the world, they typically will have 3 data centres in different locations that have the web servers and web caching servers as well as with the mysql and memcached servers. The only thing that is local is Akamai, which is a CDN and most of the time this only serves static content, ala pictures, javascript, stylesheets ect, the dynamic content will still go international regardless.

thanks tinuva. very helpful.

 

[Knersus]

Facebook uses what you call, db caching servers, which uses memory to hold data. It is way more complex that what I am describing but instead of doing a lot of mysql db reads they mostly only write to them unless a caching server reboots it will rebuild its data back from the mysql backend servers. This causes a lot less load on them as well as spreading and duplicating it over multiple servers in memory makes the whole process faster for users and servers. I believe the specific product they use for this is memcached if you want to read up on that. Obviously they do the same for the webpages as well.

However most things facebook are not replicated all over the world, they typically will have 3 data centres in different locations that have the web servers and web caching servers as well as with the mysql and memcached servers. The only thing that is local is Akamai, which is a CDN and most of the time this only serves static content, ala pictures, javascript, stylesheets ect, the dynamic content will still go international regardless.

Thanks Tinuva, that is a really good description. Ja I suspected that FB would probably serve the static content like pictures, js and stylesheets through CDN. Was also interesting to read about memcached. I've been reading up a bit about CDN, and Akamai in particular.. really interesting stuff. I always knew that FB is served up by thousands of servers, but the complexity and details of it all is incredible. FB is one of the most visited websites in the world, however (in my experience) it is almost always also one of the fastest / most responsive web sites... Same goes for Google. They really have incredible technology driving the whole show.