3 ms·
Oh, story time: Once I was using Blizzard's downloader to install something (StarCraft, Diablo, I don't remember), and it was kinda slow. I disabled P2P downlo
by bayindirh 6d ago
Oh, story time:
Once I was using Blizzard's downloader to install something (StarCraft, Diablo, I don't remember), and it was kinda slow. I disabled P2P downloads and speed skyrocketed, and I said "Huh, this was unexpected".
When P2P downloads disabled you could see the list of CDNs you're downloading from and mine had a single IP on that list. It looked familiar. Then it dawned on to me. It was the Akamai server which we were hosting in our system room, at 15 minutes of driving distance. After a chuckle, I went to get a cup of tea, because that was entertaining than the game itself.
Then of course, I dived into whatever I was installing that night.
Edit: From the screenshots in the wiki, I remembered that the progress bar was red. It was possibly Diablo 3, then. However, I'm still not 100% sure about it.
- skeptic_ai 5d agoSo how come was using your own ip? Become a Diablo node installer so you downloaded from there, like how can they convert your own akamai instance into anode without you knowing?
- bayindirh 5d agoIt's not my own IP, but our IP block. As an institution we have a couple of big networking related hats, so we have a couple of B blocks (/16 networks) for ourselves. The IP was from one of these blocks. However, these network operations (and CDN related stuff) are not managed by us, but by a couple of high profile guys next door. I knew we had an Akamai node, because the machines were shipped recently and we had a chat about it. Funnily, some of the performance optimizations on Akamai's disk access algorithms (SSDs were not dime a dozen back then, so people were still optimizing for spinning drives) was apparently developed by a friend of mine, but I don't know any details about that.