Sender-side buffers and the case for multimedia adaptation

The Internet/Web architecture has developed to the point where it is common for the most popular sites to operate at a virtually unlimited scale, and many sites now cater to hundreds of millions of unique users. Performance and availability are generally essential to attract and sustain such user bases. As such, the network and server infrastructure plays a critical role in the fierce competition for users. Web pages should load in tens to a few hundred milliseconds at most. Similarly, sites strive to maintain *multiple nines* availability targets--for example, a site should be available to users 99.999 percent of the time over a one-year period.