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