and instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream.
Wow. You make static HTTP-downloads sound like rocket science.
Honestly, this is as trivial as it gets in terms of scaling. No "512 core machine" needed whatsoever, unless they've started to fold proteins along with their downloads...
You have less than 1kb requests and less than 1kb responses on average.
Let's see how many requests a 1gb net card can do? Well it's bit's not bites, but it's also a full duplex so you have 1gbit up and download. 1gigabyte / (8 kiliobit) = 1,000,000 / 8 = 125,000 requests per second. Granted full TCP/IP has a fair amount of overhead, but if you use UDP you can get vary close to this.
Yet, they don't need to get anywhere near that performance, for every 100 million clients updating every four hours using a random second to connect is around 10k connections a second.
Comments
and instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream.
Wow. You make static HTTP-downloads sound like rocket science.
Honestly, this is as trivial as it gets in terms of scaling. No "512 core machine" needed whatsoever, unless they've started to fold proteins along with their downloads...
So you're saying Amazon S3 runs on a single CPU? :D I think we're talking about different things.
Network cards and storage adapters the limiting factors, not CPU, that is the point.
You have less than 1kb requests and less than 1kb responses on average.
Let's see how many requests a 1gb net card can do? Well it's bit's not bites, but it's also a full duplex so you have 1gbit up and download. 1gigabyte / (8 kiliobit) = 1,000,000 / 8 = 125,000 requests per second. Granted full TCP/IP has a fair amount of overhead, but if you use UDP you can get vary close to this.
Yet, they don't need to get anywhere near that performance, for every 100 million clients updating every four hours using a random second to connect is around 10k connections a second.