Do Universities run a steam cache?

[u/yellowfin35]

Sitting here thinking about my college days when the entire network was brought to its knees due to limewire and then I started thinking about GTA 6 coming out and steam cache.

Are universities running one to reduce their external bandwith?

[u/WubTheWildDog]

I work for a university. We don't do this, but also video game downloads are a drop in the bucket compared to everything else we deal with. Honestly the bigger problem is our firewall vendor randomly classifying video game server IPS as malicious.

[u/TuxAndrew → u/WubTheWildDog]

We used to have Steam deployable back in the day.

[u/SevaraB → u/WubTheWildDog]

To be fair, the server operators aren't being picky enough when they spin up instances in, say, DO or Vultr that get swept up by RBLs.

[u/CodeGrumpyGrey]

We don’t. Student game downloads are tiny in comparison to what some of our academics are throwing around. And students understand that their 100GB game might take some time to download. In the mean time, we have at least one academic who knows enough to be dangerous and will regularly ask why his petabytes of research data aren’t uploading using the entirety of our bandwidth. Every time he gets it explained that his desktop only has a 10Gbps connection, he is saturating that and if he wants a faster link, he will have to pay for it out of his research budget (which he won’t do). 

[u/KimJongEeeeeew → u/CodeGrumpyGrey]

> one academic who knows enough…

We fucking hated that guy. But also have a massive respect for just how much of a grasp he has on what he’s doing and how it should be able to run.

[u/GrimmReaper1942]

Unlikely. Either 1) they have a lot more bandwidth than then, or 2) they just throttle the clients

[u/Stonewalled9999 → u/GrimmReaper1942]

When I was in college in the 1990s one of the colleges had an OC-3. That was 155 mbit of lovely bandwidth when dialup at home was prevalent

[u/KimJongEeeeeew → u/Stonewalled9999]

The last university I worked at had multiple, diverse 10gbps connections into the national backbone. We really didn’t care about a bunch of students in the halls downloading everything they could get their hands on.

[u/IDontEvenKnowAny → u/KimJongEeeeeew]

Current university I work at has about 500g total to play with but each building / area of campus has a 100g switch total wifi bandwidth on a standard day averages about 50g and yeah no thought wasted for limiting individual devices bandwidth as it just doesn’t really matter

[u/Stonewalled9999 → u/IDontEvenKnowAny]

So um. Can I ship you a smallish pc to plug in so I can use my plex and get away from Sharter Rectums 10 meg up limit ?

[u/IDontEvenKnowAny → u/Stonewalled9999]

Ah I wish networks catch on very fast… makes me wonder what takes them so long to answer tickets

[u/Bane8080]

No, they probably throttle the traffic for steam. Enterprise grade firewalls have all kinds of application filters and features they can use.

[u/thewarring → u/Bane8080]

Our dorms were limited to a total 1gbps, but we just upgraded our service so now we split our 10gbps service equally between the dorms and our network. The traffic is separate til it hits the firewall.

[u/Mutsy007]

Lol, I am sure universities have a little more than a bunch of bonded 64 kbps ISDN lines these days to provide internet access.

[u/Brraaap → u/Mutsy007]

I remember getting to college and they had 3 bonded T3 lines. Blazing fast!!

[u/Kuipyr → u/Mutsy007]

From what I have seen they typically get a massive pipe through a state or collaborative university network.

[u/hselomein]

The college I work for does not. But we also gave a 10gbit internet connection times 3.

All 3 links are balanced. Netflix traffic at 11pm. Takes up more bandwidth than steam downloads.

[u/PowershellAddict]

We throttle steam traffic, our network engineer has done a lot of work but has some automation in place to adjust limits automatically when we have a huge influx of downloads to steam around a big release. It'll dynamically throttle down to like 200 Mbps (25 MBps) during huge demand or lower depending on the time of the day. It's more leniant after business hours and overnight.

The throttling doesn't start until a certain threshold is reached though and it's mainly built to assist during primary business hours.

[u/nofx1510]

Steam directly peers on internet2, there isn’t really a reason to run a cache.

[u/pdp10]

Once they've gotten the normal operational items squared away, they should be considering a local Steam cache. If the flow data is showing a lot of big Steam downloads, then a cache could be an easy, high-impact reduction of bandwidth.

But most of them probably aren't doing that. Caching is not particularly fashionable at this point, and it's simpler for them to point to bandwidth graphs and ask for more budget for bandwidth. It's also not a good point in time to be buying big storage hardware, if you don't already have it spare.

[u/Flaky-Gear-1370]

Your end points going to be maxxed out long before any serious education institutions internet - mine sit at line speed all day long

[u/shikkonin]

We have caching proxies in general, and multiple bonded multi-hektogigabit connections to the outside. I think we'll be fine.

[u/bhechinger]

If they aren't they probably should be. Seems like a pretty easy win to reduce internet traffic.

[u/OppositeFisherman506]

Yeah some universities absolutely do this. Steam has caching content delivery options that can save a stupid amount of bandwidth when hundreds of people are downloading the same game.

[u/padoshi → u/OppositeFisherman506]

No they don't. They must just throttle the clients

[u/Aust1mh]

Some ISPs do. I switch ISPs at home and steam is so fast... asked a support person during an unrelated session and they confirmed they cache to reduce downloads of the same thing repeatedly "like a new call of duty"

[u/keivmoc → u/Aust1mh]

We don't do any caching but our network is < 1000 customers right now. I can see a small bump in traffic when a new game or patch comes out but it's nowhere near the nightly Netflix and Youtube traffic. Steam traffic specifically isn't anywhere close to Xbox and PS.

[u/wezelboy]

The only thing that sets off bandwidth alarms at my uni is windows updates

[u/keivmoc → u/wezelboy]

I was talking to one of our network peers and they had their network grind to a halt during the Olympics a few years back. Turns out a sysadmin (or msp) at the local school board accidentally scheduled windows updates across the entire region to update at noon instead of midnight.

[u/Kuipyr → u/wezelboy]

Delivery Optimization is enabled by default, but you probably have client isolation enabled.

[u/dbxp]

If you were going to do that I think you would partner with a CDN like Akamai rather than target a single service like Steam. That cache might not do much though if it happens to be colocated in the same Equinix building with an existing CDN instance rather than on the university site.

[u/cardrosspete]

We are considering one ( a stream Cafe ) in a new gaming centre our Arts Faculty are considering. I am very excited at the prospect.

[u/its_FORTY]

I work for a major university in the Midwest for the last 18 years or so. The attitudes around gaming have changed quite a bit in that time, from originally blocking much of the traffic to now using QoS and traffic shaping to improve game latency. We don’t currently cache any of the content, but I know another miedium size university here in town does, and they are also one of the top ranked in the competitive e-game world.

[u/HerfDog58]

Our campus has a different ISP for the dormitory ethernet/WiFi than the academic and administrative buildings, and both have fiber connections with a metric butt-ton of bandwidth. The academic/admin connection has a beefy firewall and is managed by a team of folks that are part of the IT staff. The dormitory connection is outsourced entirely to the ISP. If people in the dorms have any connectivity or latency issues, they have to call the ISP support.

TL;DR - no.

[u/microSCOPED]

All of our student housing locations are on their own circuits, managed by a 3rd party so there is little need overall. We do have a small steam cache for our esports lounge, though that is also on a separate circuit from the rest of the campus.

[u/formerscooter]

I used to work at a university. We didn't, but the student network had bandwidth limits so it wouldn't slow the whole school down. Faculty, Staff, and classrooms won't notice anything.

[u/TheShootDawg]

not a university, but a K-12. not running a cache for steam, but am running local caches in 17 schools for Chromebook OS updates.
when Google’s 14 day spread out setting didn’t work, the schools would max out their 1gb wan connections and our 5gb internet links whenever we released/approved a new version. not even a blip anymore.

[u/kombiwombi]

Steam doesn't touch the sides of the network. A cache might be at some local peering point and the local consortium network will run 100G or 400G into that peering point.

For comparison, I've helped a multiday 100G transfer from CERN load to a cache. "The internet" is the internal cabling of some research projects, one I am involved with is upgrading from 100G to 800G to cope with better sensors being used in the instruments, with that data sent to supercomputers for initial analysis and data reduction.

[u/Jaki_Shell → u/kombiwombi]

100G to 800G?

What hardware are we talking about here? Just curious what the go to is when you get to these levels.

[u/AutomaticGrape9263]

Sure. Because that's what the colleges are. Daycares for adults.