Totally anecdotal evidence, but I was in a rural NY house served by DSL for the past 6 months. The DSL has consistent packet loss between 4 and 6%. The only video service that could handle this level of packet loss well was Amazon Prime. Netflix couldn't even load its browse screen until the past two weeks, where something changed, and suddenly Netflix could handle the high packet loss as well as Amazon Prime.<p>Thank you to the engineers and developers!
When deciding what mechanism to employ to load shed, you should keep in mind the layer at which you are load shedding. Modern distributed systems are comprised of many layers. You can do it at the load balancer, at the OS level, or in the application logic. This becomes a trade-off. As you get closer to the core application logic, the more information you will have to make a decision. On the other hand, as you get closer, the more work you have already performed and the more cost there is to throwing away the request.<p>You may employ techniques more complex than a simple bucketing mechanism, such as acutely observing the degree at which clients are exceeding their baseline. However, these techniques aren’t free. The cost of simply throwing away the request can overwhelm your server - and the more steps you add before the shedding part the lower the maximum throughput you can tolerate before going to 0 availability. It’s important to understand at what point this happens when designing a system that takes advantage of this technique.<p>For example, If you do it at the OS level, it is a lot cheaper than leaving it to the server process. If you choose to do it in your application logic, think carefully about how much work is done for the request before it gets thrown away. Are you validating a token before you are making your decision?
A lot of websites will now fail requests early based on a timeout, forcing users to refresh the page. I have to wonder if ad-based sites enjoy this behavior because it could lead to more ad impressions. Talking about you reddit.
For me this link just opens the Medium app and fails to load the article. I had to force it to open in a browser.<p>Seems like a pretty bad Medium bug.
So you can drop all that traffic and the users are unimpacted... So why not just always drop that traffic and don't even bother writing the code to implement those features that clearly nobody cares about?
How much better would the world be if the Netflix engineering team tackled real-world problems instead of making sure we can all binge watch Stranger Things? Such a smart group of people.