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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

#821
post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this amongst the newer "careerist" sort of software developer who is stumbling into the field for money, as opposed to the obsessive computer geek of yesteryear, who practiced it as a hobby. This character archetype is a transplant, say, less than five years ago from another, often non-technical discipline, and was taught or learned from overly simplistic materials that decry systems programming, or netw…

What does this have to do with the topic being discussed?

Because it is about people speculating on events that seem connected to their own experience, but in actuality aren’t, because they don’t understand the breadth of the distribution of the abstraction they are discussing.

This happens when your terms are underspecified: someone says “Netflix’s servers are struggling under load” and while people in similar efforts know that basically just equivalent to “something is wrong” and the whole conversation is basically esoteric to most people outside a few specialized teams, these other people jump to conclusions and start having conversations based on their own experience having to do with what is (to them) related (and usually fashionable, because that is how most smaller players figure out how to do things).

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

#822

This is probably a naive question but very relevant to what we have here. In a protocol where a oft-repeated request goes through multiple intermediaries, usually every intermediate will be able to cache the response for common queries (Eg: DNS). In theory, ISPs would be able to do the same with the HTTP. Although I am not aware of anyone doing such (since it will rightfully raise concerns of privacy and tampering).…

there's Named Data Networking (went by Content-Centric Networking earlier). You request data, not a url, the pipe/path becomes the CDN. If any of your nearest routers have the bytes, your request will go no further.

I don't see it much mentioned the last few years, but the research groups have ongoing publications. There's an old 2006 Van Jacobson video that is a nice intro.

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

#823
post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure. If there’s anything publicly traded companies are known for, it’s passing savings onto their customers instead of their shareholders.

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

#824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only time I worked on a project that had a live television launch, it absolutely tipped over within like 2 minutes, and people on HN and Reddit were making fun of it. And I know how hard everyone worked, and how competent they were, so I sympathize with the people in these cases. While the internet was teeing off with easy jokes, engineers were swarming on a problem that was just not resolving, PMs were pacing up…

Some breaks are just too difficult to predict. For example, I work in ecommerce and we had a page break because the content team pushed too many items into an array, that caused a back-end service to throw errors. Because we were the middle-service, taking from the CMS and making the request to back-end, not sure how we could have seen that issue coming in advance (and no one knew there was a limit).

I'm not saying it's easy, but start by assuming that there's a limit and that any request can throw errors? (Proceed accordingly .)

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

#825
post #8

I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically. This sure do…

So the issue is that Netflix gets its performance from colocating caches of movies in ISP datacenters, and a live broadcast doesn't work with that. It's not just about the sheer numbers of viewers, it's that a live model totally undermines their entire infrastructure advantage. See: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

they will learn :)

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

#826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details . What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?

I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot. This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better. It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity. Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up co…

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

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it means that! You only need a big enough check.

No it doesn't. India has landed on Mars for a fraction of the cost it took other nations, and the ESA has never been able to pull it off. Not every cost is fungible and money isn't always the limiting factor.

> Not every cost is fungible and money isn't always the limiting factor

Sure. This isn’t relevant to Netflix.

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

#828
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.

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

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

#829
post #8

I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically. This sure do…

Streamed glitch free for me both on my phone and Xbox. The fight wasn’t so great though, but still a fun event. Jake Paul is a money machine right now.

same. could be a bandwidth issue at CDN/ISP level at a certain region(s) ?

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

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White-Knighting for 'fucking morons' is not a good look though. You'll end up in a world where packets of peanuts have a label on saying 'may contain nuts'.

... or a world where grown adults pay millions of dollars to watch grown adults fighting like school children. In fact, what am I even doing in this thread? - close-tab.

That's the biggest confusion to me. Why on earth was this such a big deal? But perhaps Hacker News isn't the best place for that conversation.
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