Where Do You "Tube"? Uncovering YouTube Server Selection Strategy

YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing websites in the world. In order to serve its globally distributed users, it requires a massive-scale video delivery system. A major part of the whole system is to decide exactly what server machine is going to serve a client request at any given time. In this paper, we analyze DNS resolutions and video playback traces collected by playing half a million YouTube videos from geographically distributed PlanetLab nodes to uncover load- balancing and server selection strategies used by YouTube. Our results indicate that YouTube is aggressively deploying cache servers of widely varying sizes at many different locations around the world with several of them located inside other ISPs to reduce cost and improve the end-user performance. We also find that YouTube tries to use local "per-cache" load-sharing before resorting to redirecting a user to bigger/central cache locations.