Comment by est

5 years ago

Some outcomes of this morning:

1. Alibaba's teamwork app, Dingtalk, crashed around 9AM due to too many concurrent video conference saturate the server and bandwitdh

2. Tencent's for enterprise messaging app, Wechat for Business, crashed. Connection is extremely unstable

3. Baidu's office VPN was busy and employees are asked to stay disconnected to leave bandwith for sysadmins

4. Huawei's WeLink was unavailable for a while

5. Bytedance (company behind TikTok)'s Lark, an online office suite like GApps was the biggest winner, only had some minor issues.

6. Zoom offered a free version to mainland users and it's extremely popular. But it lacks non-video-conf features. e.g. simple daily poll to see if your colleagues were healthy or not.

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est

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tmp5774889  5 years ago

I've created a temp account for this to be on the safe side :)

I work for a big (300k+ ) company with some tens of thousand office workers in CN We are preparing since about 2 weeks to upgrade our remote access infra in China with partial success as something which would be a soft upgrade everywhere else needs to go through various levels of local subcontractors and partners of our provider

On top of that because of the Internet situation in CN it is not practically easy to use remote access via another location with higher capacity - the performance gets degraded very quickly - or use resources directly over the internet eg. RTC which is not hosted locally

I doubt that local authorities will change something in the future because of this example but one can only hope

  • est  5 years ago

    are you the same guy on r/sysadmin?

    Try use MPLS. It's expensive but the latency and bandwidth is guaranteed.

    • tmp5774889  5 years ago

      nope, not the same guy MPLS is used for the office network anyhow, talking about remote access here

threatripper  5 years ago

This "experiment" will set a new baseline on which management can act with the goal to satisfy such use cases and grant the necessary resources to implement them.

  • koheripbal  5 years ago

    Well the clock is ticking for non-Chinese companies. When SARS struck in 2003, it took about four months for the total global number of cases to crest. Assuming the same sort of pattern here with the same WFH response, we will see peak VPN/remote usage in April/May.

    ....so get those requisitions in boys.

    • diroussel  5 years ago

      A paper published in the Lancet on Friday said that the peak infection is persecuted to be in April. But if more curbs on movement are out in place then the total infections will be lower, but the peak will be later. But this was based on a current infected population of 75k, much higher than the Chinese official figure of 14k people.

      Source Dr John Campbell. https://youtu.be/z05ZrMfKUDc

      3 replies →

ekianjo  5 years ago

Seems like the experiment was a success: systems have very low margins to operate.

  • quickthrower2  5 years ago

    We need peer to peer. These central hubs can’t hack the traffic.

    • michaelt  5 years ago

      Peer-to-peer has its advantages, but it's no panacea.

      After all, practically everyone is behind NAT these days, and it's so rare for an application to ask you to open a port in your firewall, most users probably don't know how to do it.

      And early videoconferencing was famous for its unreliability - even simple things like people being able to join calls. Particularly as users might be behind restrictive firewalls on corporate networks or cell phone connections. Video calling that only works 95% of the time isn't good enough for things like job interviews :)

      And users don't only expect one-to-one calls - everyone offers multi-party calls. If eight people want to watch Bob while he's talking, you've got to find eight videos' worth of upload bandwidth from somewhere.

      And there are far more people trying to video call from battery-powered devices and metered connections than there were 15 years ago. If your competitors' apps uploads one video stream and yours uploads eight at once, users are going to notice the battery and data consumption.

      And if you only have to test compatibility between your server and every version of your software, that's a much simpler task than testing compatibility of every possible n-way call between different versions of your software. Especially as you'll have to support Windows, OS X, Android and iPhone at the very least.

      18 replies →

wyxuan  5 years ago

That's good to hear. Especially that last point: zoom has been repeatedly blocked by China. It would be interesting to see if they could keep those users