Fwd: Flash based games not working

[Akiva]

Just a few notes on WeJew.com streaming...

WeJew is hosted in the US.  We've been tweaking our streaming methods to
improve streaming for Israeli users.  Here's what we've done and what we've
found...

a - We did basic progressive video file streaming using Apache.  A number of
Israeli users reported slow downloading / streaming.

b - We switched to lighttpd as the streaming method, first on port 81 then
on port 8080.  Lighttpd is noted as being much faster than Apache (and has
lower server overhead), but we received a number of problem reports.  First
that the video loader just spun the 'waiting' icon and never loaded, and
second that the stream loaded extremely slowly - and this was particularly
noted on 012.net (the worst) and somewhat on Netvision.

We identified the first case as being as overly strict firewall settings,
which we were able to overcome with some player adjustments in most but not
all cases.  Some research led us to believe the case with the Israeli users
was specifically due to ISP traffic shaping.  We did experiments and found
that some protocols were consistently slow and yet others were not to our
servers from Israel, a clear sign of traffic shaping.

Interestingly, we did some additional testing to France and don't seem to
find a similar pattern.  Our guess is that some Israeli ISP's are throttling
traffic on their US backbone connections, with a focus on P2P and video
streams.

c - We switched to a http pseudo-streaming script (xmoov-php).  As soon as
we did this our Israeli customers with download delays immediately reported
a major improvement.  Even though we implemented this script with bandwidth
throttling!  Since this is delivered on port 80, the firewall issues also
were removed.  As a negative, the per-memory use on our server for each
download stream is much heavier, but fortunately memory cost is not that
high.

If anyone has suggestions on improving flash stream loading, we'd certainly
be happy to hear about it and try any suggestions.

--Akiva
WeJew.com Technical Team



On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Amos Shapira <amos.shapira at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/11 Micha Silver <micha at arava.co.il>:
> > Arie Skliarouk wrote:
> >>
> >> Forwarding to Linux-Il (see the message below).
> >>
> >> I don't have a way to check flash player 9 on the wejew.com
> >> <http://wejew.com> or walla.com <http://walla.com> sites. Can someone
> check
> >> the sites using flash player 9 please?
> >>
> > Here's the link to the specific games: (very long, careful about line
> > breaks...)
> >
> >
> http://fun.walla.co.il/ts.cgi?w=//1861/play/1/@c2p&status=all&swf_URL=http%3A%2F%2Fico.walla.co.il%2Fw6%2Fv%2Ffun%2Fc2p%2Fv5%2FRoomList_5%3Froom_id%3D1861%26amp%3Bsite_id%3D25%26amp%3Borigin%3DRoomList%26amp%3BipString%3D80.179.46.34%26amp%3Bjava_port%3D8080%26amp%3Ball_java_ips%3D%26amp%3Bnavigator%3DUnknown%26amp%3BcanRTMPT%3Don%26amp%3BmatchStarted%3Dt%26amp%3BmatchEnded%3Dt%26amp%3BgetSavedData%3Dt%26amp%3BsendMatchEnded%3Dt%26user_id%3D171724102%26random_hash%3D508006432&user_id=171724102&random_hash=508006432&globalKey=1314859720
> > You should see a list of players in the central window.
> > (The same problem appears with damka, chess, etc. on this site)
>
> Works for me.
> I could pick a game to watch and watch it being played.
> Hebrew chat between the players appeared in reverse.
>
> Using Ubuntu 9.04 32 bit. "Plugins" windows lists "Shockwave Flash
> 10.0 r32" (I keep my system up to date).
>
> BTW - about the long link - there are numerous sites to shorten links,
> e.g. http://tinyurl.com/ and http://bit.ly/
>
> Cheers,
>
> --Amos
>
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