From Kaplak Blog. Promoted by Kaplak Stream
It is interesting to note from Cuong Do Cuong’s presentation, that the mainstream problem influences the choices made also on the architectural/design level for serving videos : more popular videos are kept upfront in cache, ready to be played back when requested; less popular videos have to be loaded from deeper within the system.
This means, that popular videos will always deliver at top speed, while the videos on the ‘tail’ will frequently suffer from speed problems. Anyone who’s played back a YouTube video will know from experience, that this is true.
From a scalability and systems efficiency viewpoint it makes a lot of sense to get all those pending requests for popular stuff served as speedily as possible. However, this also seems to reinforce the mainstream problem, in so far as niche videos suffers not only from poorer visibility than popular ones, but also from the reduced accessibility which comes from reduced speeds and more frequent ‘halts’ because of caching issues. Popular videos are more speedily seen and shared, which reinforces their popularity. Niche videos are less speedily spread and perhaps even more often aborted by their viewers because of annoying stops. This of course further reinforces the niche character of these videos.
Tags : caching, Cuong Do Cuong, Kaplak Stream, long tail, mainstream problem, scalability, YouTube
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