What is wrong with YouTube these days?
Earlier I wrote about some terrible speed issues I was having with YouTube. Basically, it’s taking a long long time to download videos, much more time than it actually takes to play such videos. As a result, the entire site is basically unbrowseable. I thought maybe YouTube was just having overall connection issues, but I’ve talked with some other people who live in different places and use different ISPs, and they aren’t having any YouTube issues at all.
So what’s up? Is my ISP doing something fishy with connections to YouTube? Are they throttling the bandwidth, trying to edge out someone they see as a competitor? My ISP is Verizon, and the service we get here is FIOS. I know, from this recent net neutrality debate, that ISPs absolutely detest content providers online (actually, they seem to detest every company that makes the net worthwhile in the first place, which is an idiotic stance). My Internet speed is blazing fast when it comes to everything except YouTube. I present here two traceroutes that shows some fishy goings-on.
> tracert youtube.com Tracing route to youtube.com [208.65.153.241] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1] 2 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 72.83.123.1 3 3 ms 4 ms 4 ms P1-3.LCR-03.WASHDC.verizon-gni.net [130.81.32.68] 4 6 ms 7 ms 7 ms so-6-0-0-0.PEER-RTR1.ASH.verizon-gni.net [130.81.10.90] 5 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 130.81.15.74 6 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms p10-0.core01.iad01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.2.29] 7 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms v3493.mpd01.iad01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.5.38] 8 228 ms 214 ms * youtube.demarc.cogentco.com [38.112.2.142] 9 * * * Request timed out. 10 * * * Request timed out. 11 * * * Request timed out. 12 * * * Request timed out. 13 114 ms 114 ms 87 ms www.youtube.com [208.65.153.241] Trace complete.
And for a comparison, here’s a traceroute from residential Comcast cable in the same area. No YouTube speed issues, and also, no curious bumps on the route!
$ traceroute youtube.com traceroute: Warning: youtube.com has multiple addresses; using 208.65.153.251 traceroute to youtube.com (208.65.153.251), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 1.638 ms 1.500 ms 2.002 ms 2 * * * 3 ge-1-22-ur01.hyattsville.md.bad.comcast.net (68.87.136.113) 13.772 ms 11.832 ms 8.515 ms 4 te-9-3-ur02.lanham.md.bad.comcast.net (68.87.129.46) 10.816 ms 10.361 ms 14.266 ms 5 te-9-1-ur01.lanham.md.bad.comcast.net (68.87.129.61) 9.854 ms 18.277 ms 12.107 ms 6 te-9-1-ur01.bowie.md.bad.comcast.net (68.87.128.177) 11.910 ms 11.444 ms 23.309 ms 7 te-8-2-ar01.capitolhghts.md.bad.comcast.net (68.87.128.182) 11.382 ms 19.264 ms 13.928 ms 8 68.86.252.214 (68.86.252.214) 12.578 ms 13.319 ms 11.975 ms 9 68.86.90.93 (68.86.90.93) 27.061 ms 14.773 ms 23.944 ms 10 te-7-3.car1.Washington1.Level3.net (63.210.62.57) 32.968 ms 12.514 ms 14.822 ms 11 ae-23-56.car3.Washington1.Level3.net (4.68.121.176) 17.105 ms * ae-13-53.car3.Washington1.Level3.net (4.68.121.80) 13.969 ms 12 YOU-TUBE-IN.car3.Washington1.Level3.net (4.79.168.6) 13.277 ms 14.189 ms 12.020 ms 13 * * * 14 64.15.116.9 (64.15.116.9) 38.218 ms 37.988 ms 40.803 ms 15 * * * 16 * * * 17 208.65.153.251 (208.65.153.251) 90.180 ms 90.669 ms 90.843 ms
So, is Verizon pulling some sinister plot? Or am I seeing devils in the bush that just aren’t there? It would help to have some corroboration. If you’re having any YouTube issues, please, leave a comment.
January 17th, 2007 at 23:35
How do you download videos from YouTube? I only know how to watch them, but how do you download them?
January 17th, 2007 at 23:42
P.S.: I also use Verizon. (It’s the only high-speed content provider in my area.)
January 18th, 2007 at 15:15
Well, the way anything on the Internet works is that to be able to see something, you have to have downloaded it. Now in the vast majority of circumstances these things are just downloaded temporarily into memory or cache and then discarded; of course, you can explicitly choose to save something to your hard drive and store it forever. When I said it takes so long for them to download, I was referring to the creeping bar in the YouTube player that shows much of the video has downloaded. It starts at nothing and grows across the bottom; you can’t play anything that isn’t contained in the bar, because it isn’t downloaded yet.
And there are applications and scripts you can find online that will let you save a video off of YouTube onto your hard drive for later offline viewing. Just do a Google search, you’ll find them. It’s really trivial to do. It’s not like the videos are encrypted or anything.
February 15th, 2007 at 08:31
I thought something was going on with my internet connection but everything else is working. Now I am finding that my movies only play half way if that. Now their button faces have disappeared. Youtube is so good but I think it is struggling.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:49
YouTube is still the victim of exponential growth. They haven’t maxed out their niche yet, and it is very tough to keep pace with exponential growth by buying and installing massive amounts of new infrastructure.
There probably isn’t a month that goes by where YouTube doesn’t have more servers on order.
February 8th, 2008 at 08:10
also i have problem qith youtube i cant watch video its very very slow i dont know whats wrong with it?!? and yes there is way to download videos from youtube first take the URL and paste it in this website http://www.keepvid.com and then choose youtube then click download thats all
tc all, bye bye
February 24th, 2008 at 15:00
I always thought that since google owns youtube that youtube ran on google servers. I thought this would make youtube run really fast because google servers are massive. But now sometimes and it happens more and more I usually start browsing by putting a good song on youtube and begin. So I use youtube like my total mediaplayer. But more and more recently there have been problems with the site. This I attribute to an exponential influx of people watching videos all at the same time and if youtube is not using google servers well than that explains it. I think they should focus all of there profit on making there servers massive just like google. Because I do not care how well a server may run you can not do it with just a couple hundred thousand servers and if millions of servers is what youtube needs than do it. Everyone I know watches youtube like there tv and many of them have given up there cable because they find it useless. Youtube could be the first real internet broadcast site that runs efficiently but they just do not have the servers to back it up. they need to get themselves together or else people will just say well they have lots of stuff on google video and those videos are hosted by googles massive servers Sooooo there wont be too much lag if you watch videos with google and then google should just make youtube its video provider and let them use there servers. Or else people will go to another video site and make that the next youtube and youtube will be left in the dust!
February 24th, 2008 at 15:08
YouTube was only acquired by Google somewhat recently. Maybe they haven’t transitioned everything into mixed server farms yet, or maybe it’s simpler not to. It’s conceivable that the server farms YouTube runs in are separate from the rest of Google’s server farms.
May 7th, 2008 at 22:36
yes i am having u tube issues too
May 8th, 2008 at 10:44
I totally thought that was a penis joke. “u tube” clearly isn’t, but it was how I read it at first, you know?
I have to point out that having YouTube on the same servers as the main Google stuff would be extremely frustrating for me. I use many of Google’s services, all of which are pretty much text-based, and they run at a decent speed. They would not perform reliably, I suspect, if combined with YouTube. Strangely enough, I don’t want my access to basic things - like email - based on the whims of people who can’t wait an extra second for their Greenday to load. Or whoever’s popular.
My direct response to Theodore, however, is that he should check out Veoh. In terms of large-scale video distribution, it’s a much better model than YouTube. It feels a little questionable to me, sort of Mac-ish somehow, but I’ve used it a little and it works fairly well.