Sender-side Buffers and the Case for Multimedia Adaptation

Has developed to the point where it is common for the most popular sites to operate at a virtually unlimited scale, and many sites now cater to hundreds of millions of unique users. Performance and availability are generally essential to attract and sustain such user-bases. As such, the network and server infrastructure plays a critical role in the fierce competition for users. Web pages should load in tens to a few hundred milliseconds at most. Similarly, sites strive to maintain multiple nines availability targets-for example, a site should be available to users 99.999% of the time over a one-year period. © 2012 ACM 0001-0782/12/12.