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Discussion on: How would you go about providing minimal-latency web experience for a single local event?

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saki7 profile image
Nana Sakisaka

I've thought of providing a local DNS server along with a local ultra-fast Wi-Fi network for your specific local event... especially when you mention sometilhing like: "they access the website as usual, but under the hood you treat them differently"

I am aware that some people might feel this kind optimization evil, but if everything is local... I mean everything in real... who cares?

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Ben Halpern

This would create a faster experience, but everyone would still ultimately be going to Utah and back right? If your website could be edge-cached right at the event, how might we go about serving that HTML on-location somehow?

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Nana Sakisaka • Edited

This would create a faster experience, but everyone would still ultimately be going to Utah and back right? If your website could be edge-cached right at the event, how might we go about serving that HTML on-location somehow?

Yes. My original thoughts are basically a workaround for getting things faster while being minimally evil™.

You can do edge-caching for your local event if you build the original network like so, but you still need to take control of the local DNS server to point to that specific on-location cache.

I think you can't just do edge-caching (or on-site-caching) for websites where you don't have control to; that's a real evil stuff IMHO. If you really need to empower those external (yet specialized to your event) websites, I think the best way is to make a contract with their company and do the regular edge-caching as the event organizer.

EDIT: if you don't want to modify the network, why not change your domain's A & AAAA records to point to your local server machine at your event location, then make that machine an edge node for HTML caching?

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Nana Sakisaka • Edited

Oh, I remember a real world example for this: the Comic Market.

Comic Market is the largest offline otaku event in Japan... (590,000 / 3days) people attends the single event. The place is basically 3-4 huge domes.

The network issue have been a big (and well-known) problem since then, people started to solve it technically. In recent years, tech team from the Japanese mobile network company (e.g. Softbank, au, NTT Docomo) attends the event officially; you can find their state-of-the-art van with huge antenna. Yes, it's a van-sized yet huge base for huge network (i.e. the Japanese mobile network itself).

Wild Wi-Fi access points (i.e. mobile Wi-Fi station) is strongly discouraged at Comic Market, because they cause congestion. Most people know that their normal mobile network is the best and some people know those hard efforts are being made behind the scene.