Re: Microsoft's Black Tuesday bandwidth impact?

[Bill Nash <billn () billn net>]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:

> Every month I look at my upstream bandwidth graphs and I see no blip in the
> hours before 3 am on Microsoft's Black Tuesday.  I would think that with the
> thousands of PCs out on our network downloading updates around that time
> that I would see *something*.  I know every Black Tuesday I see my three
> PC's blinking a logon screen.
>
> Are MSFT's monthly updates really a non-event in regards to internet
> bandwidth?

Users are too far from the firehose to feel the more interesting effects. 
That said, it's hit or miss, from month to month. If you have peering to a 
CDN network (llnw, akam, etc), you'll certainly see Patch Day roll 
through, since you're sitting on the aggregation of a large flow of data. 
As an end user, especially in an enterprise with admin's that are worth 
anything, you're not talking about a massive amount of data, in many 
cases. Service packs, sure, those are generally a bit bigger, but hotfixes 
and the like, usually pretty small. I don't even notice patches on my home 
connection, since they're a drop in the bucket compared to all the other 
content rolling around. Youtube and similar content flows are more 
noticeable.

I think the only enterprise users who would notice a large influx of 
data are the ones who don't run caches.

- billn