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I figured I'd post my ramblings on this subject in The Back Porch, as the Internet affects everyone's daily live anymore - not just the techies and nerds at this point. I thought it was interesting, but I'm weird, so you may not think it is interesting at all.
I work in IT and sometimes it baffles me how little I know about how the Internet actually works.
Three days ago (8/12/2014), you might have noticed that some of your Internet connections were slow or intermittent; either from your house, your place of business, or wherever you were that day. If you didn't, then whoever planned your work-place infrastructure is doing a good job. Even then, though, it was probably still slow or intermittent, and it wasn't just you. It was the whole world.
Here's why:
Basically, if you don't understand what those links are saying, Internet-facing edge-device routers around the world started running out of memory. The route table each router holds (think of this as a contact list that also includes mapped-out directions on how to get to that specific contact) that tells them exactly how to get anywhere else on the Internet grew to a size that some routers in poorly planned network infrastructures could no longer handle. These router tables are constantly growing. Major edge-facing devices have RAM (memory) to process these routes, and a lot of them only have 512 MB (half a gig) of memory. So, when the route tables settled in at over half a gig's worth of data on Tuesday, routers started flipping their shit and dropping traffic or taking a long time to process requests.
This would not affect something like your in-home router - at least not directly. This would only affect large companies and Internet Service Providers directly, but the connection issues would have trickled down to everyone.
I work in IT and sometimes it baffles me how little I know about how the Internet actually works.
Three days ago (8/12/2014), you might have noticed that some of your Internet connections were slow or intermittent; either from your house, your place of business, or wherever you were that day. If you didn't, then whoever planned your work-place infrastructure is doing a good job. Even then, though, it was probably still slow or intermittent, and it wasn't just you. It was the whole world.
Here's why:
Basically, if you don't understand what those links are saying, Internet-facing edge-device routers around the world started running out of memory. The route table each router holds (think of this as a contact list that also includes mapped-out directions on how to get to that specific contact) that tells them exactly how to get anywhere else on the Internet grew to a size that some routers in poorly planned network infrastructures could no longer handle. These router tables are constantly growing. Major edge-facing devices have RAM (memory) to process these routes, and a lot of them only have 512 MB (half a gig) of memory. So, when the route tables settled in at over half a gig's worth of data on Tuesday, routers started flipping their shit and dropping traffic or taking a long time to process requests.
This would not affect something like your in-home router - at least not directly. This would only affect large companies and Internet Service Providers directly, but the connection issues would have trickled down to everyone.
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