7 ms·

AMS-IX Breaks 4 Terabits per Second Barrier

66 points by usethis 11y ago

rottyguy 11y ago
How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?
- pmorici 11y ago
  Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rottyguy 11y ago
    I would be surprised if, practically speaking, 8bits <> 1 byte for 99.99% of all general applications. My feeling is that the .01% can do the math so the other 99.99% don't have to.
    - euyyn 11y ago
      Yeah but specifically for networking, error-detecting and error-correcting codes can make a byte at the app level > 8 bits on the wire, transparently. The capacity of the hardware is independent of that, so they talk in bauds.
- LeonM 11y ago
  Data is send serially over a fiber or copper line, bit by bit, not per byte. Also because bytes can be compressed, bits cannot, so giving the throughput in bits-per-second is an absolute value.
  - rottyguy 11y ago
    Bytes can be compressed in sequence not in singularity (just as bits). I mean why don't we measure storage in bits and not bytes? Just seems unnecessarily confusing.
    - userbinator 11y ago
      Actually, memory chips (NAND flash, DRAM) are usually specified in terms of bits, usually using a lowercase 'b' to denote 'bit'. Online sellers have used this to their advantage, selling e.g. "1Gb" flash drives, with real 1 gigabit flash chips, which turn out to be ~128 megabytes.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        Or 120 megabytes.
- jo909 11y ago
  Even if the only reason is historical: why not, what advantage would bytes per second have?
  - rottyguy 11y ago
    How long does it take to transfer a gigabyte file? Sure we can do the math but why (considering the average person)? Maybe there should be a common core revolution in engineering :-)
    - jo909 11y ago
      I can't do the exact math for that without looking up up a bunch of stuff. I don't how much I need to subtract for the multiple headers and other overhead, how fast the transfer rate gets to the maximum, how many packages get lost, what other factors of the congestion control algorithms might impact my transfer etc
      - Tepix 11y ago
        Try this bandwidth calculator (it's in German, but I think it's not hard to understand) http://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/ http://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/
        jo909 11y ago
        You are missing my point: the raw bit rate of the network is not the rate of file transfers. There is a bunch of logic around the raw bits in the wire that make it mich more complicated than dividing by 8
        georgerobinson 11y ago
        For example, the TCP throughput equation which can be expressed by the following http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cheung/Courses/558/Syllabus/07-TCP-Anal/FIGS/TCP-TPut.gif http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cheung/Courses/558/Syllabus/07-... (depending on your degree of accuracy).
heromat 11y ago
"... underlines AMS-IX’s leading position within the global Internet Exchange Point market." Yeah, i.e. DE-CIX is constantly hitting the 4 Tbps barrier for quite some time now and is trending towards 5 Tbps. https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/
- fs111 11y ago
  The Dutch are better at marketing, it seems.
  - akie 11y ago
    They never said they were the first to break this barrier (but I had to go back and check).
- usethis 11y ago
  Full updated list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...
  - deugtniet 11y ago
    Well, to be fair, AMS-IX is located around the Amsterdam Area (a circle of around 30 km orso), while DE-CIX has locations in the US as well. I'm not familiar with the specifics, but based on these locations, I'd say AMS-IX is the biggest internet exchange serving europe.
    - virtuallynathan 11y ago
      DE-CIX doesn't combine their stats from all exchagnes, as far as I know. AMS-IX also serves NYC, the Bay Area, Chicago, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean
    - wobbleblob 11y ago
      The DE-CIX graph seems to be about the Frankfurt exchange. AMS-IX doesn't just serve the Amsterdam area, it's where many undersea cables from North America and the UK enter the European mainland. I'm more surprised that 'List of Internet exchange points' isn't dominated by North American and Asian exchanges. Do they have a larger number of smaller ones?
jakozaur 11y ago
Yay. More peering at Internet Exchanges makes internet faster and cheaper. Europe has the lowest effective cost of bandwidth: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
porsupah 11y ago
By way of historical comparison, consider that in 1992, the ULCC's transatlantic "fat pipe" was a 1.5Mbps circuit: http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/graphs/1992-Fig5-UK-US-Fat-pipe-Connectivity.gif http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/grap... Or that the total traffic served by the University of Bath's website across all of 1997 was 63MB: https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+History https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+His...
- JosephRedfern 11y ago
  Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year. 6310241024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!
  - porges 11y ago
    Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath.ac.uk/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath... [This page is 3,780 bytes.] In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac.uk/About/Usage/WWW/Monthly/1997-05.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac... This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable. So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May). Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!
    - logicallee 11y ago
      it reads as if by order of magnitude jump you mean "megabyte to gigabyte" but (obviously, now that I point it out) that is 3 orders of magnitude jump!
NietTim 11y ago
Thanks to the launch of iOS 9 :) Funny to see the big bump after 19:00
Loic 11y ago
This is really interesting to see the 19h -> 24h increases in traffic. Most likely due to online streaming, this is a predictable sharp increases on the Hamburg and Munich POP[0] for DECIX. [0] https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ (scroll a bit down)
- TranceMan 11y ago
  More likely due to the release of iOS9. A couple of other European Internet exchanges also peaked last night [0]. In the past few years Apple have been embracing public peering much more - according to PeeringDB they are at 37 locations with many having multiple 100G connections. 0: https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html
  - threeseed 11y ago
    But Apple uses Akamai as their CDN. I always assumed given its age and role that it would have the best peering bar none.
    - TranceMan 11y ago
      They have built their own CDN - http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/apple-building-cdn-software-video-delivery.html http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/apple-building-cdn-so...
  - Loic 11y ago
    If you look at the weekly statistics, you see the bump everyday. If iOS is putting a concentrated load on the network from 20h to 24h, they could redesign a bit their update system to spread a bit more during the day...
    - TranceMan 11y ago
      It's not that easy. The peak at that European time is due to people getting home to unrestricted Internet access - which means their device can phone home and update. I don't believe in coincidences ;)
tantalor 11y ago
How is this a "barrier"?
Ecco 11y ago
Those numbers seem very low to me, I feel like something doesn't add up. Indeed, 1 GBits FTTx offers from FAI are getting more and more widespread, so that would mean that the peak traffic is around only 4000 simultaneous users?
- zifnab06 11y ago
  Usage vs capacity. I have Gbit service at home, but I'm not saturating the link 24/7.
  - georgerobinson 11y ago
    Genuine question! Have you ever been able to saturate your connection with a single TCP stream or did it require multiple streams (possibly from multiple devices)?

66 points by usethis 11y ago

How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?

pmorici 11y ago
Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rottyguy 11y ago
  I would be surprised if, practically speaking, 8bits <> 1 byte for 99.99% of all general applications. My feeling is that the .01% can do the math so the other 99.99% don't have to.
  - euyyn 11y ago
    Yeah but specifically for networking, error-detecting and error-correcting codes can make a byte at the app level > 8 bits on the wire, transparently. The capacity of the hardware is independent of that, so they talk in bauds.
LeonM 11y ago
Data is send serially over a fiber or copper line, bit by bit, not per byte. Also because bytes can be compressed, bits cannot, so giving the throughput in bits-per-second is an absolute value.
- rottyguy 11y ago
  Bytes can be compressed in sequence not in singularity (just as bits). I mean why don't we measure storage in bits and not bytes? Just seems unnecessarily confusing.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    Actually, memory chips (NAND flash, DRAM) are usually specified in terms of bits, usually using a lowercase 'b' to denote 'bit'. Online sellers have used this to their advantage, selling e.g. "1Gb" flash drives, with real 1 gigabit flash chips, which turn out to be ~128 megabytes.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      Or 120 megabytes.
jo909 11y ago
Even if the only reason is historical: why not, what advantage would bytes per second have?
- rottyguy 11y ago
  How long does it take to transfer a gigabyte file? Sure we can do the math but why (considering the average person)? Maybe there should be a common core revolution in engineering :-)
  - jo909 11y ago
    I can't do the exact math for that without looking up up a bunch of stuff. I don't how much I need to subtract for the multiple headers and other overhead, how fast the transfer rate gets to the maximum, how many packages get lost, what other factors of the congestion control algorithms might impact my transfer etc
    - Tepix 11y ago
      Try this bandwidth calculator (it's in German, but I think it's not hard to understand) http://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/ http://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/
      - jo909 11y ago
        You are missing my point: the raw bit rate of the network is not the rate of file transfers. There is a bunch of logic around the raw bits in the wire that make it mich more complicated than dividing by 8
        georgerobinson 11y ago
        For example, the TCP throughput equation which can be expressed by the following http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cheung/Courses/558/Syllabus/07-TCP-Anal/FIGS/TCP-TPut.gif http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cheung/Courses/558/Syllabus/07-... (depending on your degree of accuracy).

heromat 11y ago

"... underlines AMS-IX’s leading position within the global Internet Exchange Point market." Yeah, i.e. DE-CIX is constantly hitting the 4 Tbps barrier for quite some time now and is trending towards 5 Tbps. https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/

fs111 11y ago
The Dutch are better at marketing, it seems.
- akie 11y ago
  They never said they were the first to break this barrier (but I had to go back and check).
usethis 11y ago
Full updated list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...
- deugtniet 11y ago
  Well, to be fair, AMS-IX is located around the Amsterdam Area (a circle of around 30 km orso), while DE-CIX has locations in the US as well. I'm not familiar with the specifics, but based on these locations, I'd say AMS-IX is the biggest internet exchange serving europe.
  - virtuallynathan 11y ago
    DE-CIX doesn't combine their stats from all exchagnes, as far as I know. AMS-IX also serves NYC, the Bay Area, Chicago, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean
  - wobbleblob 11y ago
    The DE-CIX graph seems to be about the Frankfurt exchange. AMS-IX doesn't just serve the Amsterdam area, it's where many undersea cables from North America and the UK enter the European mainland. I'm more surprised that 'List of Internet exchange points' isn't dominated by North American and Asian exchanges. Do they have a larger number of smaller ones?

jakozaur 11y ago

Yay. More peering at Internet Exchanges makes internet faster and cheaper. Europe has the lowest effective cost of bandwidth: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

porsupah 11y ago

By way of historical comparison, consider that in 1992, the ULCC's transatlantic "fat pipe" was a 1.5Mbps circuit: http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/graphs/1992-Fig5-UK-US-Fat-pipe-Connectivity.gif http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/grap... Or that the total traffic served by the University of Bath's website across all of 1997 was 63MB: https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+History https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+His...

JosephRedfern 11y ago
Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year. 6310241024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!
- porges 11y ago
  Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath.ac.uk/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath... [This page is 3,780 bytes.] In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac.uk/About/Usage/WWW/Monthly/1997-05.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac... This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable. So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May). Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!
  - logicallee 11y ago
    it reads as if by order of magnitude jump you mean "megabyte to gigabyte" but (obviously, now that I point it out) that is 3 orders of magnitude jump!

NietTim 11y ago

Thanks to the launch of iOS 9 :) Funny to see the big bump after 19:00

Loic 11y ago

This is really interesting to see the 19h -> 24h increases in traffic. Most likely due to online streaming, this is a predictable sharp increases on the Hamburg and Munich POP[0] for DECIX. [0] https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ (scroll a bit down)

TranceMan 11y ago
More likely due to the release of iOS9. A couple of other European Internet exchanges also peaked last night [0]. In the past few years Apple have been embracing public peering much more - according to PeeringDB they are at 37 locations with many having multiple 100G connections. 0: https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html
- threeseed 11y ago
  But Apple uses Akamai as their CDN. I always assumed given its age and role that it would have the best peering bar none.
  - TranceMan 11y ago
    They have built their own CDN - http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/apple-building-cdn-software-video-delivery.html http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/apple-building-cdn-so...
- Loic 11y ago
  If you look at the weekly statistics, you see the bump everyday. If iOS is putting a concentrated load on the network from 20h to 24h, they could redesign a bit their update system to spread a bit more during the day...
  - TranceMan 11y ago
    It's not that easy. The peak at that European time is due to people getting home to unrestricted Internet access - which means their device can phone home and update. I don't believe in coincidences ;)

tantalor 11y ago

How is this a "barrier"?

Ecco 11y ago

Those numbers seem very low to me, I feel like something doesn't add up. Indeed, 1 GBits FTTx offers from FAI are getting more and more widespread, so that would mean that the peak traffic is around only 4000 simultaneous users?

zifnab06 11y ago
Usage vs capacity. I have Gbit service at home, but I'm not saturating the link 24/7.
- georgerobinson 11y ago
  Genuine question! Have you ever been able to saturate your connection with a single TCP stream or did it require multiple streams (possibly from multiple devices)?