Paging Cab

Here you can have this back...UKRMMA#23, hardly used and in excellent
condition.

I must say it's very nice to be able to argue with Radio 4 again,
particularly the guy today who was claiming that 4x4's are essential
for "a 21st century lifestyle".

 

I get Radio 4 over here. Occasionally. When the sun spot acitity is
just right...

 

Cab wrote

You can get it on the interwebby, who needs satellite dishes anymore?

 

It's great when it works. The R4 server seems to be the most in demand
at midnight, just when I want to hear the news.

 

I was *well* confused this morning[0], when I dragged myself out of the
depths of slumber to hear JaM instead of Today.


[0] Even more confused than usual[1].
[1] Especially for that time of day.

 

I never get a chance to listen to it during the day. LW reception only
here when I'm out and about and that's fairly crap most of the time.

 

New series starts BHM at 18:30, apparently.

--
| ___ Salad Dodger
|/ \
_/_____\_ GL1500SEV/CBR1100XXX/KH500A8/TS250C
|_\_____/_| ..75127../..18653.../..3196./.19406
(>|_|_|<) TPPFATUICG#7 DIAABTCOD#9 YTC#4 PM#5
|__|_|__| BOTAFOT #70 BOTAFOF #09 two#11 WG*
\ |^| / IbW#0 & KotIbW# BotTOS#6 GP#4
\|^|/ ANORAK#17 IbB#4
'^' RBR Landmarks: 12 Pts: 220 Miles: 914

 

Other than the origin encoder, the R4 streams are served from the
same machines as (pretty much) all the other streams. I can't see
from where when peak time is, but it's definitely not around
midnight.

Must be something else.

 

I completely forgot about the strike, and when I turned on the radio at
7:30 and got ISIHAC[1]

I thought maybe there'd been a revolution or something.

[1] or JAM - I forget which now, they were both on before and after the
8:00 micro-news, but I forget the order.

 

Odd thing is; when I have trouble getting a R4 stream, the R3,2,1,etc
streams work fine - therefore I was assuming overloading of the R4
server. Otoh, since I don't know how it's set up, that's probably
bollocks anyway.

I've noticed problems when ICQ is running - but this happens even when
ICQ is disabled.

 

There's a piece from "The Wizard Of Oz" that would be most apposite...

 

I do, and it is

 

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember ogden <> saying
something like:

R4 server.

So there's no queuing? Or is load shared? There must, surely, be a limit
to how much traffic the whole streaming setup can handle?

 

Load shared across a farm of machines. The same machines will spit
out pretty much all the live streams (likewise all clips are served
from the same kit, whether radio4 or 1xtra, whatever) with a few
exceptions.

As to a limit, yes, there is. But unless something huge is kicking off
(eg. Olympics, Diana's death, world cup final - certainly not the news
at midnight!) you won't find it.

There are three main farms in the UK. One legacy Realmedia, where each
box can pretty much saturate 100Mbps FE, and there's probably about 80
of them, plumbed across three or four gig circuits to a fat core. One
legacy Windows Media, which never (afaik) maxes out. And the new farm
put in for the Olympics, where each box can spit out about 700Mbps of
streams, and they're wired straight in to the fat core (we're talking
bonded ten gig Ethernet on 720Gbps chassis, not a couple of netgears
and some damp string)

I don't think that gives away anything likely to get me a bollocking,
but should hint at the capacity. And you really really really aren't
going to stress it with the midnight news.

That said, you *may* find (depending on your ISP) that you're served
from the farm in New York, which is a bit different, but still
shouldn't max out at 7pm.

 

Must be something my end then. It's odd that only R4 is affected -
possibly a port issue, do you think?

 

Same port, same servers, different stream (like requesting a different
file from a web server - it's still port 80. Or not, as it were.)