this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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how does it work?
Looks like it mostly just buffers the video more aggressively. If you have a good Internet connection it won't do anything useful other than peg the server's connection downloading the entire video file at gigabit speeds and make it worse for other viewers.
If you have good internet it could make it significantly better
Tcp transfers are limited by the product of window size and latency, if I am in Australia with gigabit internet downloading from Europe then I could be limited at mere megabits with a single connection!
I've pulled multi gigabit between Australia and Europe back when I worked at PIA, over OpenVPN over TCP. You just need the appropriately sized buffers and window sizes.
You need extra large buffers because you need to hold on to the packet until acknowledgement in case you need to retransmit it. At gigabit+ with some 300ms to deal with, it can be like some hundreds MB of packets, on top of the regular queue.
But fair enough, that will workaround the issue.
Bingo, that's the core issue. Big fat windows decrease operating efficiency at large scale and if most clients are nearbyish it's unnecessary.
I've noticed PIA do a good job, maybe that's your work at play!
Nope. Everything has been replaced by Kape's infrastructure, from what I've heard. I worked there 2016-2019, so 5 years ago already.
They did do an alright job with the app though vs what we had to deal with back then. I ran those kinds of speed tests between regions over OpenVPN in part to disprove speed complaints which, Windows + OpenVPN + TCP on Windows 7, yeah the speeds weren't amazing but nothing I could do about that.
It was kind of funny in retrospect though, everyone online was like PIA is faster, no AirVPN is faster, no ExpressVPN and flame wars of which one had the worst speeds. I measured it, it was all the fucking speed/latency curve on the client's side 😂
Hahahaha classic. I'm on wireguard so I think it's all UDP now? I imagine the same tuning as OpenVPN UDP?
There's no way your internet is faster than the server's (in most cases)
I'll have to try it out for youtube, I'm on gigabit internet (and hardwired), but youtube will often stall out when trying to buffer part way through videos and take quite awhile to figure itself out.
I would worry about getting rate-limited then, I've seen some content servers just be very picky about making too many requests (through jumping in the video too far too often).
"You're trying to be efficient and you use a computer too well, you must be a bot! You're banned."
My experience every time I try to use most ecommerce sites like amazon
It's more that abnormal traffic gets flagged, and you end up getting limited
I get that its abnormal for me to open twenty tabs for a bunch of products and a bunch of different queries simultaneously. That's just being good at computers, and it should be encouraged.
Don't ban people who are abnormal. Machine learning anomaly detection is making the internet unusable.