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Comment by temp667 | Hacker News Reader

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temp667·

Question - why are apple downloads slow - I don't get it.

I've downloaded lots of stuff from google. Its rarely slow.

I use cloudfront on AWS - also rarely slow.

Apple - often slow. They have billions - is there something wrong with their caching layer at ISPs etc?

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They're actually usually pretty decent, back when I had a gigabit connection I would regularly saturate it with Xcode or macOS or whatever beta Apple had the for the week. The issue is that when they're rushing and developers are rushing they just don't handle the load well at all–right after presentation when new things get posted is usually a bad time :/ Perhaps they just don't scale very well.

That is what I mean. When netflix releases a popular new show - it basically still streams etc. The bandwidth must still be nuts.

Apple falls over after big events for developers etc. Is there not a cashing layer locally at ISP level - ie, push '209 out in advance to ISP cache, then everyone can gobble it up when you announce and link on your website?

It really depends on region. I have seen in US, most of the downloads are fast as that is their main region I guess. As the network latency does not matter when downloading big files, I use that VPN and get much better speed than using local CDN.

Mac mini's don't have fast NICs, and they're probably still unable to use the current Mac Pros for production reasons. The old Mac Pros keep rolling off the rack.

Apple is likely not using Mac hardware for the majority of their datacenters: https://www.quora.com/What-OS-used-on-the-servers-in-Apples-...

A Mac Mini with gigabit ethernet can saturate a gig and not break a sweat.

A Mac Mini with a 10G Ethernet port can saturate 10G.

So, how are they not fast?

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