Magnatune giving Coral CDN a try

A few days ago, I wrote about the open CDN "Coral" which allows me to send mp3 file playing requests through Coral's bandwidth, rather than using Magnatune's bandwidth.

Today (sunday), as a test I've switched over all Magnatune .m3u files to point to mp3 files through Coral.

Please let me know if you have any problems.

One reason for me to give Coral a try now, even though I'm not low on bandwidth, is because non-USA users sometimes find Magnatune slow to use, presumably because the transatlantic bandwidth links between their ISP and Magnatune's ISP is all clogged up. So, perhaps using Coral's bandwidth, which may be better (differently?) wired to the Internet, may help those people.

Another reason is that if Magnatune gets slashdotted, we won't have enough bandwidth to handle the load, which would be a shame, and in a slashdotting case, I'd switch over to using Coral to weather the storm.

My plan is to switch back to not using Coral if there are problems, and I expect the fact that Coral uses port 8090, rather than the standard http port of 80, will cause some people behind firewalls problems, but we'll see.

Comments

[Arto Teräs]

Hi,

I must say that I've experienced less consistent download rates in mp3 streams now than before the switch. The result was cuts in the audio, often several times per song. However, I was able to mostly work around the problem by increasing the buffer in my player to 512 kB with 256 kB minimum filled when the song starts (up from the default 128 kB / 32 kB and I plan to increase it still a bit more) so I'm fine with the current situation too.

I live in Finland and have an 8Mbit/1Mbit ADSL supplied by Elisa, one of the biggest ISP's around here.

AJT

[Nathan Jones]

I grabbed two copies of the same song (URLs below). The one from Magnatune was very quick - 173KB/s. The one from CDN is coming through at about 7-10 KB/s at the moment. 70% downloaded, estimated time left is 3 mins. So, it seems to take longer than the song's play time, which is why I noticed stalling in Winamp.

I don't know how much of this is due to the corporate proxy at this end, the capacity at the CDN end, or the network path in between. I'll try again via my home connection and report back...

1. http://magnatune.com/artists/music/Metal/SoulPrint/In%20Spite%20of%20it%20All/10-Shadows-SoulPrint.mp3

2. http://he4.magnatune.com.nyud.net:8090/all/10-Shadows-SoulPrint.mp3

[Nathan Jones]

Must just be our stupid proxy doing something stupid.

I just tried "wget --proxy=off" from a machine on the office network and got the file in under 2 mins (59K/s). Much the same result from my home machine.

Stupid proxy...

[John Buckman]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, it sounds like Coral works, but the bandwidth isn't reliable enough right now to be a swap, so I've switched Coral off on Magnatune, and won't switch it on unless we get slashdotted to some other huge flow of traffic we can't keep up with.

-john