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Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

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Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#641

Post by StressedDev »

nikolay wrote: post #635

The arrogant Netflix! They always brag about how technologically superior they are, and they can't handle a simple technological challenge! I didn't have a buffering issue, I had an error page - for hours! Yet, they kept advertising the boxing match to me! What a joke! If you can't stream it, don't advertise it to save face with people like me who don't care about boxing!

Every organization makes mistakes and every organization has outages. Netflix is not different. Instead, of bashing them because they are imperfect, you might want to ask what you can learn from this incident. What would you do if your service received more traffic than expected? How would you test your service so you can be confident it will stay up?

Also, I have never seen any Netflix employees who are arrogant or who think they are superior to other people. What I have seen is Netflix's engineering organization frequently describes the technical challenges they face and discusses how they solve them.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#642

Post by SG- »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #601

This livestream broke the internet, no joke. youtube was barely loading and a bunch of other sites too. 130M is a conservative number given all the pirate streams.

don't confuse your ISP breaking with every other provider or the rest of the Internet. It was more than fine here.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#643

Post by DharmaPolice »

burntalmonds wrote: post #628
geor9e wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been doing live events since 2023. But it's hard to be prepared for something that's never been done by anyone before — a superbowl scale event, entirely viewed over the internet. The superbowl gets to offload to cable and over the air. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my stream. So it sounds like the bandwidth problems might be localized, perhaps by data center or ISP.

Yeah, I think people are incorrectly assuming that everyone had the same experience with the stream. I watched the whole thing and only had a few instances of buffering and quality degradation. Not more than 30 seconds total during the stream.

Even if it was only 30% of people had a problem that's still millions of unhappy users. Not great for a time sensitive event.

Also, from lurking in various threads on the topic Netflix's in app messages added to people's irritation by suggesting that they check their WiFi/internet was working. Presumably that's the default error message but perhaps that could have been adjusted in advance somehow.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#644

Post by skybrian »

mbrumlow wrote: post #559
softwaredoug wrote: post #495

The way to deal with this is to constantly do live events, and actually build organizational muscle. Not these massive one off events in an area the tech team has no experience in.

I have this argument a lot in tech. We should always be doing (the thing we want to do) Somme examples that always get me in trouble (or at least big heated conversations) 1. Always be building: It does not matter if code was not changed, or there has been no PRs or whatever, build it. Something in your org or infra has likely changed. My argument is "I would rather have a build failure on software that is already re…

Doing dry runs regularly makes sense, but whether actually shipping it makes sense seems context-dependent. It depends on how much you can minimize the side effects of shipping a release.

Consider publishing a new version of a library: you'd be bumping the version number all the time and invalidating caches, causing downstream rebuilds, for little reason. Or if clients are lazy about updating, any two clients would be unlikely to have the same version.

Or consider the case when shipping results in a software update: millions of customer client boxes wasting bandwidth downloading new releases and restarting for no reason.

Even for a web app, you are probably invalidating caches, resulting in slow page loads.

With enough work, you could probably minimize these side effects, so that releasing a new version that doesn't actually change anything is a non-event. But if you don't invalidate the caches, you're not really doing a full rebuild.

So it seems like there's a tension between doing more end-to-end testing and performance? Implementing a bunch of cache levels and then not using it seems counterproductive.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#645

Post by YZF »

notimetorelax wrote: post #639
nikolay wrote: post #635

The arrogant Netflix! They always brag about how technologically superior they are, and they can't handle a simple technological challenge! I didn't have a buffering issue, I had an error page - for hours! Yet, they kept advertising the boxing match to me! What a joke! If you can't stream it, don't advertise it to save face with people like me who don't care about boxing!

I think you’re oversimplifying it. Live event streaming is very different from movie streaming. All those edge cache servers become kinda useless and you start hitting peering bottlenecks.

Edge caches are not useless for live streaming. They're critical. The upstream from those caches has no way of handling each individual users. The stream needs to hit the edge cache and end users should be served from there.

A typical streaming architecture is multi-tiered caches, source->midtier->edge.

We don't know what happened but it's possible they ran out of capacity on their edge (or anywhere else).

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#646

Post by Mistletoe »

Thaxll wrote: post #591

In 2012 Youtube did the Red Bull stratos live stream with 8m concurrent users. We're 12 years later, Netflix fucked up.

The funny thing is I was just reading something on HN like three days ago about how light years ahead Netflix tech was compared to other streaming providers. This is the first thing I thought of when I saw the reports that the fight was messing up.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#647

Post by mastazi »

geor9e wrote: post #566
softwaredoug wrote: post #495

The way to deal with this is to constantly do live events, and actually build organizational muscle. Not these massive one off events in an area the tech team has no experience in.

They've been doing live events since 2023. But it's hard to be prepared for something that's never been done by anyone before — a superbowl scale event, entirely viewed over the internet. The superbowl gets to offload to cable and over the air. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my stream. So it sounds like the bandwidth problems might be localized, perhaps by data center or ISP.

Maybe they considered this event as a rehearsal for the upcoming NFL streams which I am guessing might have a wider audience

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#648

Post by [deleted] »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #608
xyst wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making excuses for a multibillion dollar company that has been in this game for many years. Maybe the first to market in streaming. This isn’t NFLX’s first rodeo in live streaming. Have seen a handful of events pop up in their apps. There is no excuse. All of the resources and talent at their disposal, and they looked absolutely amateurish. Poor optics. I would be amazed if they are able to secure another exc…

Sorry for the off topic but what’s this thing that I only come across in Hacker News about referring to a company by their stock exchange name (APPL, MSFT, etc) outside of a stock context? It seems really weird to me.

[deleted]

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#649

Post by lxgr »

skybrian wrote: post #644
mbrumlow wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this argument a lot in tech. We should always be doing (the thing we want to do) Somme examples that always get me in trouble (or at least big heated conversations) 1. Always be building: It does not matter if code was not changed, or there has been no PRs or whatever, build it. Something in your org or infra has likely changed. My argument is "I would rather have a build failure on software that is already re…

Doing dry runs regularly makes sense, but whether actually shipping it makes sense seems context-dependent. It depends on how much you can minimize the side effects of shipping a release. Consider publishing a new version of a library: you'd be bumping the version number all the time and invalidating caches, causing downstream rebuilds, for little reason. Or if clients are lazy about updating, any two clients would b…

It's very hard to do a representative dry run when the most likely potential points of failure are highly load-dependent.

You can try and predict everything that'll happen in production, but if you have nothing to extrapolate from, e.g. because this is your very first large live event, the chances of getting that right are almost zero.

And you can't easily import that knowledge either, because your system might have very different points of failure than the ones external experts might be used to.

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