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How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

(netflixtechblog.com)
160 points simplesort | 2 comments | 08 Apr 25 18:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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butlike ◴[08 Apr 25 19:42 UTC] No.43625701[source]▶
All that logging and they cant figure out why people are going to other streaming services
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ASalazarMX ◴[08 Apr 25 19:50 UTC] No.43625773[source]▶
Despite their awful UX, I'm always impressed with how reliable their service is, technically speaking. Video is always good and responsive even on less-than-stellar connections, you can leave a show paused for hours, and resume it almost instantly. Their fast.com speed test is always much faster than your regular internet access, I guess thanks to their Open Connect Appliances.

It must be great to work for them in infrastructure and backends.

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ndriscoll ◴[09 Apr 25 00:25 UTC] No.43627779[source]▶
Not that this detracts from the wider point, but I'd expect unpause to just work unless you go out of your way to make it not work. Even if you drop the connection at some point, afaik they use ~15 Mb/s as their "premium" bitrate, so e.g. a 30 s buffer takes less than 64 MB. That gives plenty of time to re-establish streaming after an unpause. It's not like the computer forgets what it was doing if you leave it alone.
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1. ASalazarMX ◴[09 Apr 25 18:49 UTC] No.43635988[source]▶
Counterpoint: Plex and Jellyfin free resources if you leave your video paused too long, and it will take a noticeably amount of time to resume streaming, much more if it needs transcoding.

They're not going out of their way to annoy us, they try to be efficient with the finite resources a home server has. Netflix is going out of their way to make it smooth no matter what you do, even if they have to pool a bit of their own resources for it.

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2. ndriscoll ◴[11 Apr 25 23:26 UTC] No.43659807[source]▶
Buffering would be on the client though. Assuming it has a couple dozen MB of memory, it should be able to buffer like 30 seconds. I realize their resume has more to do, but e.g. my jellyfin server can initiate playback or seek within maybe 100-250 ms (it's just barely a noticable pause after a random seek). So a 30 s buffer should be more than sufficient for unpausing without any stutter.