I didn't see in the Twitter thread--can anyone tell me what was driving this huge spike in traffic on Gov.uk? I'm not in the UK so I'm not up to the minute with political announcements.
I was one of the people whose first reaction was to look on gov.uk to understand the scope of the new lockdown, rather than some rehash of it in the media. It took me just two mouse clicks (open gov.uk favourite, click on a link [0] near the top of the page) to find this info. This is just awesome.
The sort of thing that multicast was intended to solve, instead of everyone requesting their own stream of the same data. But MC never gained traction even though most ISPs in the UK are now IPv6-enabled.
IPv6 doesn't have anything to do with multicast - it works fine on v4. For some definition of works - the only industry where I've heard of it being used extensively is finance.
For live events like press conferences or sports this is already solved with broadcasting.
> the only industry where I've heard of it being used extensively is finance.
> For live events like press conferences or sports this is already solved with broadcasting.
16 million people watched that press conference on BBC TV, broadcasting is very efficent at getting live pictures out. The BBC did experiment with multicast in the past, but CDNs seem to be a more scalable solution ironically.
However in this specific case, the pictures actually left downing street via multicast (SDI form camera into encoder, MPEG-TS over multicast to the studio, back to SDI to get encoded on whichever output chain it is - Terrestial, Satelite, Cable, online)
Indeed the standard to replace SDI (2110) is built around multicast, broadcast certainly uses multicast a fair bit.
This wasn't any stream of the announcement driving this; this was people looking up statistics and information about COVID-19 and related restrictions.
Not only did the PM announced a new full lockdown in a TV address, as others have already said, but he also specifically gave a gov.uk URL as way to check details and rules.
Huge audience plus that equalled massive traffic spike.
Yet, it seemed that the guidance the PM mentioned wasn't online at the moment that he mentioned it.
Like many, I was hitting F5 repeatedly on this page waiting for a document that didn't seem to be there, eager to know restrictions on various aspects of life. But the /coronavirus page just contained stale advice from December.
Eventually at 8:15pm, somebody found a link to a PDF of the new guidance and posted it on Twitter:
"This has all been done with such crashing urgency that they haven’t even been able to transpose the PDF version of the guidance into the website yet, it is here:"
