nanog mailing list archives

Re: NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study


From: Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2021 13:56:44 -0800


On 1/3/21 1:50 PM, Mark Delany wrote:
On 03Jan21, Brandon Martin allegedly wrote:
I was thinking more in the original context of this thread w.r.t.
potential distribution of emergency alerts.  That could, if
semi-centralized, easily result in 100s of million connections to juggle
across a single service just for the USA.  While it presumably wouldn't
be quite that centralized, it's a sizable problem to manage.
Indeed. But how do you know the clients are still connected? And if they aren't, there is
not much a server can do beyond discarding the state. Presumably the client would need to
run a fairly frequent keep-a-live/reconnect strategy to ensure the connection is still
functioning.

Which raises the question: how long a delay do you tolerate for an emergency alert? I
think the end result is a lot of active connections and keep-a-live traffic. Not really
quiescent at all. In the end, probably just as cheap to poll a CDN.

I just sent some mail to the myshakes folks at UCB asking if they have an achitecture/network document. In their case for earthquakes it need to be less than ~10 seconds so they are really pushing the limit. If they get back to me, I'll share it here.

Mike


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