What's the internet going through tonight?

November 3, 2020 5:37 PM

I'm curious about what the internet is experiencing tonight. How can I get a layperson's understanding of how many people are online tonight vs. 4 years ago, or how tonight's web traffic contrasts with a normal day's traffic. How about individual websites -- like the major news sites or 538 or the like? I don't know anything about any of it, but it strikes me as wildly bigger than 4 years ago. That time, I was watching TV. Now even my elderly mom is glued to her browser. Inform me!
posted by BlahLaLa to Technology (6 answers total)

As far as I can tell, the internet is OK with tonight. What's hard to cope with is something like New Year's Eve c. 2015, when tons of people try to send photos to others at the same time, almost every hour, on the hour, and you basically have the Atlantic Ocean to figure out what's been failing so you can fix it before NYC.

But for people refreshing madly at infographics, images, and articles? Probably not a big deal. (Folks more in the know should correct me.) If you're normally streaming Netflix and tonight you're on 538, that might be fewer bytes on the internet tubes.

Much of this is due to preparation: major media outlets could have chosen to defer non-critical updates to their infrastructure (i.e. the computers they run on) so that they could focus on making their websites as resilient as possible, e.g. conducting stress tests.
posted by batter_my_heart at 9:57 PM on November 3, 2020

when tons of people try to send photos to others at the same time vs. people refreshing madly at infographics, images, and articles

Also the former is immune to caching; the latter is cached about 5 layers deep.
posted by Mitheral at 10:06 PM on November 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'm in Germany rather than the US, but as it happens one of my local news sites did happen to mention that the Frankfurt internet node did see it's highest ever traffic at 10 terabit per sec yesterday evening our time. However, as they mentioned a lot of that is just due to COVID, with more people streaming, and working from home. The election was just the cherry on the top.

(10 terabit per sec is apparently the equivalent of 2.2 million videos in HD-quality simultaneously or Datenmenge about 2.2 billion A4 sheets of paper.)
posted by scorbet at 4:39 AM on November 4, 2020

Individuals visiting websites is actually a small part of internet traffic. Services like VOIP and other streaming functions use more bandwidth. Of course it's possible that any particular ISP's servers could be overtaxed.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:57 AM on November 4, 2020

Text << voice / pictures << video. The content on a news site is maybe a few hundred kilobytes to a few megabytes. A video stream does that in seconds. Some stuff like Netflix is cached very well, possibly even down to your actual neighborhood. The bigger the news site the better it is probably cached, by a "content delivery network". Possibly if more people are streaming live TV (like to a smart TV or streaming stick) you could see a strain, since it is less likely to be cached.
posted by wnissen at 6:41 AM on November 4, 2020

Here’s a CNN article with more info on tv viewers and web traffic to news sites.
posted by scorbet at 12:19 AM on November 7, 2020