Slow YouTube

[jezuk1]

Hi all,

99% of the time:
When viewing YouTube HD videos in 720p/1080p they buffer quickly and saturate my connection while doing so until part or all of the video has been locally downloaded.

1% of the time:
I have also noticed lately (over the past few weeks) YouTube videos are extremely slow to load ONLY if the following criteria is met:

- Low view count (I don't have an exact figure but generally less than 50 views)
- Possibly recently uploaded (within 24/48 hours)
- Low demand
(this isn't scientifically proven!)

This whole thing came about when a friend uploaded a video a few weeks ago which I tried to watch in HD mode. Initially it was not loading at all, the 1st second of the video would download and then it would pause for perhaps 30 seconds before another second would play and then pause yet again. I was determined to watch the video and kept pausing/playing/reloading in an attempt to trigger some sort of data flow (I don't know how the YouTube flash player is coded but I guessed there may be some ways to encourage it to make another request for data).

After a while, roughly 5 minutes, data started to flow faster and faster until viewing the video was saturating my connection once again. I concluded and explained to my friend (as a total guess) that Google obviously has a very complicated network and I suspected this video was stored somewhere in their backend far far away and seeing as it's a new and unwatched video it took a while before it was pushed out to my nearest CDN site, or prioritised enough to justify the effort to serve it to me. I don't honestly know! Totall guesswork

A week or two later the same thing happened again. My friend uploaded a video and the following day I tried to watch it. Same story, if not worse. I couldn't watch more than a second or two for at least 10 minutes. I did a quick test in the meanwhile and watched a popular video in HD, it saturated my connection once again, no problems at all. I asked my friend if he was able to load this video (He's using BT - yes, I've tried to convince him to come to idnet, I hope some day!) and he was, it was saturating his connection (while I was still unable to load practically anything at all). This immediately blew my original perception out the window. I then considered perhaps Google is even more complex than I originally thought and perhaps there are individual arrangements with various providers. Either way I was now unsure if the issue was a Google one or an IDnet one, so it encouraged me to make this post.

What do you folks think?

Jez

[Steve]

Which DNS servers are you using? Just wondering if Google thinks your somewhere different than your nearest server.

[Glenn]

Stopping the the stream then trying again via the same link 'cures' some problems, possibly because the file is not cached on the local Google farm.

[jezuk1]

Which DNS servers are you using? Just wondering if Google thinks your somewhere different than your nearest server.

Idnet

Should add - this isn't a big issue, it's only happening occasionally with some videos so it's not breaking the functionality of YouTube in general but would be nice to get the bottom of 

[pctech]

I would concur with what Glenn has said as requesting the video for the first time in the UK causes it to be copied to Google's UK cache it would appear.

Note that this behaviour occurs regardless of ISP as video does not stream well over transatlantic connections due to the latency this induces.

[Adrian]

I have installed "namehelp" which is specifically designed to overcome the problems associated with using OpenDNS or Google DNS. I won't go into the details here but you can get it from

http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/namehelp.