On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Gadi Evron wrote:
On a similar note, anti virus companies add a delta of rand out of 300 minutes or so, for the same reason--coupled with the need of the net connection to not be self-DDoS'd.
I find online game updates to be much more interested, bandwidth-wise, but never looked at MS's update as in organizations I was with it was controlled by a local centralized server (or 100).
Game patches are a different animal, the bandwidth profile is very different, since it has a heavy user demand on it, with patch time determined by the user and is often as close to release as possible. Very often, the patch is a content update that'll include graphic content. Blizzard did the right thing going with a torrent style patcher, even if they use a CDN to seed it. In my experience, they're one of the few that does/did that. - billn