My gosh, what in the word was that coming out of my local Akamai aanp servers yesterday !? starting at about 12:00 noon central time lasting several hours ?
-Aaron
Yeah we saw that as well. Must be a game release or something.
Yes, that’s my understanding as well.
- Jared
Call of Duty Modern Warfare Update came out yesterday.
https://dotesports.com/call-of-duty/news/cod-mw-update-version-1-13
Modern Warfare update is what I'm being told.
I did around 4Gpbs from the Xbox network and 1.5Gbps via PS.
Bezos phone sending Videos to MBS 
What a S Show.
Fornite update?
This echoed events a month or so ago, and I'm curious as to what is making these releases more, uh, network-impacting.
Game releases are hardly a new thing, but these last two events seem to be almost an order of magnitude higher than what we're used to (at least on our predominantly eyeball network.)
Any thoughts from the community? We're taking steps to accommodate, but from a capacity-planning perspective, this seems non-linear to me.
Or is it just in my head?
Once upon a time, Bryan Holloway <bryan@shout.net> said:
Game releases are hardly a new thing, but these last two events seem
to be almost an order of magnitude higher than what we're used to
(at least on our predominantly eyeball network.)
Games are bigger now, and more people are downloading (rather than
buying discs)? I have games on my Xbox that are over 100G.
People have faster connections these days?
My understanding is that, in addition to factors others have mentioned (games are larger, more network based delivery, etc.), that there's a move AWAY from differential patching, to the extent it was previously being used, toward simply delivering an entire new copy of the game, including assets that completely duplicate those that someone may already have.
Apparently the rationale is that this is easier on the publisher and those preparing the release, which allows them to get things out sooner, since they don't have to come up with a decent differential patcher and can just make use of the delivery mechanisms already present on the content platform the user is already using.
When you've got 100GB games with huge market penetration and each "patch" is an entirely new copy of said 100GB game, that's a lot of traffic.
Be prepared for an entire new world of hurt this holiday season. Sony has already
confirmed that PS5 releases will ship on 100Gbyte blu-ray disks. Which means that
download sizes will be comparable...
There’s also the “we will stream you all the data things” I keep hearing about like the
Consoles without discs or some other thing I can’t remember the name of.
I think this is a tribute to how we’ve built and upgraded networks for capacity and speed.
- Jared
It was a 48GB for PC, or 12GB+ XBOX/PS4 update for Call of Duty.
Traffic doubled to our dorms after 4pm, and I had to shift traffic around for multiple R&E members last night. My weathermap doesn’t turn orange or red often, but it did yesterday.
I think this is a tribute to how we’ve built and upgraded networks for capacity and speed.
I think it’s spot on.
In years past it made more sense to distribute smaller , incremental patches. More work on the software side, but it was likely a better option than getting blasted on Twitter because “OMG I WANT TO PLAY AND MY DOWNLOAD IS TAKING 8 HOURS”.
This just follows the same rules as networks have always seemed to; If you build it, they will come, and you’ll have to build more. 
Love it Love it Love it
I have been telling people that the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group needs to start looking beyond 400 Gb/s Ethernet. It’s only a matter of time where we will need it!
This just follows the same rules as networks have always seemed to; If you build it, they will come, and you’ll have to build more.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Just found the size of the updates, 48 GB on PC, 13 GB on PS4, and 18 GB on Xbox One. Makes sense why the college residence halls we supply internet to were pulling so much data. All those systems if left on would pull a lot of data.
Thank you,
Kevin McCormick
> This just follows the same rules as networks have always seemed to; If you build it, they will come, and you'll have to build more.
Yup, there is also (in networking at least) suppressed demand -- I'm
sure we've all seen capacity planning discussions along the lines of:
"My 1GE is running at 95% capacity - I'm replacing it with a 10GE and
it will be around 10% used... wait?! What?! It's now at 7Gbps?! How
the hell did that happen?!" scenarios. They usedto be funny, but these
days I just find it depressing...
W
I find it both happy and disturbing. I remember the first 2.4/2.5g links I turned up as well as the first 10g and (eventually) the first 100g links.
I was leaving the house earlier this week thinking about how it used to be Mbps of traffic that was a lot and now it’s Gbps and how that’s shifted to Tbps.
While it makes me feel old, it’s also something that I marvel about periodically.
- jared