On Friday 23 September 2005 07:34 am, Bill Earl wrote:
> >>Akamai is a huge web caching service.
> >>A lot of banner ads and other content get cached on their service.
>
> Microsoft also uses Akamai to host a lot of the Windows Update stuff.
> It's probably the "Automatic Updates" service checking to see if there
> are any patches available, which it would then either silently download
> and install, just notify you about them, or do nothing at all, depending
> on your settings.   :/
>
> If you Google for Akamai and Windows Update you'll get a bunch of news
> about when MS switched to using Akamai to host that content.  Here's one
> article on /. that has a tiny bit of info.
>
> http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=60931&cid=5746664

It's not just Microsoft using Akamai... they are seemingly everywhere.  They 
claim to handle 15% of the 'net traffic and that seems about right to me.  I 
would guess that *most* of the top 100 most active websites use Akamai.

Calling them a "web caching service" doesn't do it justice, though.  That 
makes them sound like a company with a bunch of 'squid' proxies setup.  What 
Akamai does is provide hosting on load-balanced, highly fault tolerant system 
over very fat pipes.
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