# Performance Characterization of a Commercial Video Streaming Service

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04966/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FedPrune: Towards Inclusive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14205/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the growing popularity of video streaming over the Internet, problems such as re-buffering and high startup latency continue to plague users. In this paper, we present an end-to-end characterization of Yahoo's video streaming service, analyzing over 500 million video chunks downloaded over a two-week period. We gain unique visibility into the causes of performance degradation by instrumenting both the CDN server and the client player at the chunk level, while also collecting frequent snapshots of TCP variables from the server network stack. We uncover a range of performance issues, including an asynchronous disk-read timer and cache misses at the server, high latency and latency variability in the network, and buffering delays and dropped frames at the client. Looking across chunks in the same session, or destined to the same IP prefix, we see how some performance problems are relatively persistent, depending on the video's popularity, the distance between the client and server, and the client's operating system, browser, and Flash runtime.