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Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
Until very recently, at McMurdo, nearly a thousand people, plus numerous scientific projects and operational workloads, all relied on a series of links that provided max, aggregate speeds of a few dozen megabits per second to the entire station. We could pull the full installer down to the South Pole slowly and conscientiously: throttled, at low, background priority, using robust, interrupt-tolerant tooling, with support for caching and resumption of paused or failed transfers. I hope the examples I’ve shown in this post have been a helpful illustration of how minor oversights or under-developed features back home can become major issues in a place with slow Internet.
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