Where Do You "Tube"? Uncovering YouTube Server Selection Strategy

Author

Adhikari, Vijay Kumar ; Jain, Sourabh ; Zhang, Zhi-Li

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci. & Eng., Univ. of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

fYear

2011

fDate

July 31 2011-Aug. 4 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing websites in the world. In order to serve its globally distributed users, it requires a massive-scale video delivery system. A major part of the whole system is to decide exactly what server machine is going to serve a client request at any given time. In this paper, we analyze DNS resolutions and video playback traces collected by playing half a million YouTube videos from geographically distributed PlanetLab nodes to uncover load- balancing and server selection strategies used by YouTube. Our results indicate that YouTube is aggressively deploying cache servers of widely varying sizes at many different locations around the world with several of them located inside other ISPs to reduce cost and improve the end-user performance. We also find that YouTube tries to use local "per-cache" load-sharing before resorting to redirecting a user to bigger/central cache locations.

Keywords

cache storage; resource allocation; social networking (online); DNS resolutions; ISP; PlanetLab; YouTube server selection strategy; cost reduction; load-balancing strategy; massive-scale video delivery system; per-cache load-sharing; server machine; video playback; video sharing websites; Cities and towns; Extraterrestrial measurements; Google; IP networks; Organizations; Servers; YouTube;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2011 Proceedings of 20th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Maui, HI

ISSN

1095-2055

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0637-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCCN.2011.6006028

Filename

6006028