Server selection in large-scale video-on-demand systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Video on demand, particularly with user-generated content, is emerging as one of the most bandwidth-intensive applications on the Internet. Owing to content control and other issues, some video-on-demand systems attempt to prevent downloading and peer-to-peer content delivery. Instead, such systems rely on server replication, such as via third-party content distribution networks, to support video streaming (or pseudostreaming) to their clients. A major issue with such systems is the cost of the required server resources. By synchronizing the video streams for clients that make closely spaced requests for the same video from the same server, server costs (such as for retrieval of the video data from disk) can be amortized over multiple requests. A fundamental trade-off then arises, however, with respect to server selection. Network delivery cost is minimized by selecting the nearest server, while server cost is minimized by directing closely spaced requests for the same video to a common server. This article compares classes of server selection policies within the context of a simple system model. We conclude that: (i) server selection using dynamic system state information (rather than only proximities and average loads) can yield large improvements in performance, (ii) deferring server selection for a request as late as possible (i.e., until just before streaming is to begin) can yield additional large improvements, and (iii) within the class of policies using dynamic state information and deferred selection, policies using only “local” (rather than global) request information are able to achieve most of the potential performance gains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".