>>>> 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.
Not sure how fat all their pipes are since they do have servers
scattered onto other networks. ASU has akamai servers on the campus
itself to reduce their bandwidth needs to major sites like Yahoo or
Apple's movie trailers.
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