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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

#801

Post by eviks »

nemothekid wrote: post #739
survirtual wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an event like this, there already exists an architecture that can handle boundless scale: torrents. If you code it to utilize high-bandwidth users upload, the service becomes more available as more users are watching -- not less available. It becomes less expensive with scale, more available, more stable. The be more specific, if you encode the video in blocks with each new block hash being broadcast across the n…

Torrents are awful for live events. 1. Everyone only cares about the most recent "block". By the time a "user" has fully downloaded a block from Netflix's seedbox, the block is stale, so why would any other user choose to download from a peer rather from netflix directly? 2. If all the users would prefer to download from netflix directly rather than a p2p user, then you already have a somewhat centralized solution, a…

1. Because Netflix is at capacity? Or because the peer is closer and faster than the original?

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

#802

Post by eviks »

transcriptase wrote: post #768
survirtual wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an event like this, there already exists an architecture that can handle boundless scale: torrents. If you code it to utilize high-bandwidth users upload, the service becomes more available as more users are watching -- not less available. It becomes less expensive with scale, more available, more stable. The be more specific, if you encode the video in blocks with each new block hash being broadcast across the n…

I don’t pay my ISP each month to be part of a streaming sites infrastructure. I pay the streaming site each month to use theirs.

And you'll pay less if you become a part

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

#803

Post by yearolinuxdsktp »

SoftTalker wrote: post #723
cabinguy wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you know the answer to your questions is: of course they do. However, I’m in the same boat as you. The joke’s on us, I guess.

I guess my question is: why? "Cable boxes" are uniformly awful to use in my experience. The UI is clunky, they take up space and it's another remote and another tangle of wires to try to hide. What advantage do they offer in 2024?

https://www.cabletv.com/blog/why-people-still-pay-for-cable says it’s inertia, live sports and ease of use.

Don’t act so surprised—-streaming is a pain in the ass to figure out. People have been trained to tolerate a 3-second UI lag for every button press (seemingly all cable boxes are godawfully shitty like this—-it must be the server-side UI rendering design?)

BUT! You can record your game and the cable TV DVR is dead reliable and with high quality. There is no fear of competing for Wi-Fi bandwidth with your apartment or driveway neighbors, and the DVR still works even if cable is out. And as long as you haven’t deleted the recording it won’t go away for some stupid f’ing reason.

Finally, the cable TV DVR will let you fast forward through commercials—-or you can pause live TV to break for bathroom and make a snack, so you can build up a little buffer, now you are fast forwarding commercials on nearly-live TV. You can’t fast forward commercials with most mainstream streaming anymore. Who broadcasts your big games? Big players like Paramount+ won’t let you skip commercials anymore. The experience is now arguably worse. Once you settle in, forward 30sec back 30sec buttons work rather smoothly (that’s one part of cable TV boxes that has sub-half-second latency).

Your concern about extra remotes and extra boxes and hiding wires is a vanity most don’t care about. They are grateful for how compact big-screen TVs are these days compared to the CRTs or projection TVs of the past. They probably have their kids’ game console and a DVD/BluRay player on the same TV stand anyway.

Apparently movies purchased on Roku are now on Vudu. I hope that people who bought movies on Roku were able to figure it out. This is how technology sucks. Movies purchased with my cable provider’s Video On Demand are still with me, slow as shit as navigating to them is.

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

#804

Post by mbrumlow »

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…

These are the very arguments I get all the time.

1) I want to invalidate caches, I want to know that these systems work. I want to know that my software properly handles this situation.

2) if I have lazy clients. I want to know. And I want to motivate them on updating sooner or figure out how to force update them. I don’t want to not update because some people are slow. I want the norm to be it is updating, so when there is a reason to update, like a zero day, I can have some notion that the updates will work and the lazy clients will not be an issue.

I am not talking about fake or dry runs that go through some portion of motions, I want every aspect of the process to be real.

Performance means nothing if your stuff is down. And any perceived performance gained by not doing proper hygiene is just tweaking the numbers to look better than they really are.

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

#805

Post by shermantanktop »

david-gpu wrote: post #786
shermantanktop wrote: post #698

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this: 1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine. 2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is a…

Completely agreed. There are also former employees who have very educated opinions about what is likely going on, but between NDAs and whatnot there is only so much they are willing to say. It is frustrating for those in the know, but there are lines they can't or won't cross. Whenever an HN thread covers subjects where I have direct professional experience I have to bite my tongue while people who have no clue can b…

nods knowingly

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

#806

Post by Jach »

andai wrote: post #697
rconti wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument is obvious for anyone who has been on call or otherwise responsible for system stability. It's very easy to become risk-averse in any realm.

Doesn't ensuring stuff actually works tangibly lower risk?

Not exactly, but it's worth the experiment in trying things anyway. Say you currently have a release once every few months, an ambitious goal would be to get to weekly releases. Continuous enough by comparison. But 'lower risk' is probably not the leading argument for the change, especially if the quarterly cycle has worked well enough, and the transition itself increases risk for a while. In order for a committed attempt to not devolve into a total dumpster fire, various other practices will need to be added, removed, or changed. (For example, devs might learn the concept of feature flags.) The individuals, which include management, might not be able to pull it off.

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

#807

Post by mbrumlow »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #676
skybrian wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like all of these considerations, although I also imagine for every context there is some frequency at which it is worthwhile to invalidate the caches to ensure that all parts of the system are still functioning as expected (including the rebuilding of the caches).

This.

I can’t tell you the I bet of times things worked because the cache was hot. And a restart or cache invalidation would actually cause an outage.

Caches must be invalidated at a regular interval. Any system that does not do this is heading for some bad days.

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

#808

Post by shermantanktop »

dartos wrote: post #744
leptons wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt a "microservice" has anything to do with delivering the video frames. There are specific kinds of infrastructure tech that are specifically designed to serve live video to large amounts of clients. If they are in fact using a "microservice" to deliver video frames, then I'd ask them to have their heads examined. Microservices are typically used to do mundane short-lived tasks, not deliver video.

There’s very likely a dedicated service for delivering frames. That’s service would technically be a “microservice” even if it is a large service.

Why is that “very likely”?

I’m genuinely curious about the reasoning behind that statement. It’s very possible that you are using a different set of assumptions or definitions than I am.

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

#809

Post by mbrumlow »

andai wrote: post #697
rconti wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument is obvious for anyone who has been on call or otherwise responsible for system stability. It's very easy to become risk-averse in any realm.

Doesn't ensuring stuff actually works tangibly lower risk?

Yes. Because it lowers the chance compound risk. The longer you go without stressing the system the more likely you will have a double failure, thus increasing your outage duration.

Simply put. You don’t want to delay funding out something is broke, you want to know the second it is broken.

The the case I am suggesting, a failed release will be often deploying the same functionality, thus many failure modes will result in zero outage. It all failure modes will result in an outage.

When the software is expected to behave differently after the deployment, more systems can result in being part of the outage. Such as the new systems can’t do something or the old systems can’t do something.

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

#810

Post by damontal »

everly wrote: post #222

Cable TV (or even OTA antenna in the right service area) is simply a superior live product compared to anything streaming. The Masters app is the only thing that comes close imo. Cable TV + DVR + high speed internet for torrenting is still an unmatched entertainment setup. Streaming landscape is a mess. It's too bad the cable companies abused their position and lost any market goodwill. Copper connection direct to ev…

Apple TV MLB games look incredible compared to live cable tv.
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