Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 193 Southern Telecom and Northern Netcom

Liu Shiyu's words gave Chen Cheng some confidence.

Anyway, it's just a matter of singing a few songs and then letting them air. Neither I nor Liu Shiyu will say anything. Even if the whole country has heard these songs, who would know that I sang them?

So he readily agreed.

Just treat it like singing karaoke, sing these songs and record them.

Liu Shiyu was also a little impatient. Chen Cheng had just sung several songs with piano accompaniment, and Chen Cheng's skill level was limited, so the piano accompaniment was also relatively simple.

Sometimes, the instrumental track is also very important. A single intro can make a song go viral. So, if you ask your old classmates who are still making music to help you create the instrumental track, the effect will definitely be better.

Then, Liu Shiyu asked Chen Cheng, "Tell me honestly, do you have any other original works?"

Chen Cheng was like someone who wouldn't bite when there were too many lice. As a reborn person, since he had already started the "take what you can get" approach, he might as well just take whatever he could.

So he smiled and said to Liu Shiyu, "I often hum some melodies at random. Some I write down and gradually develop into a song, while others are just a short passage. If I have the opportunity in the future, I will sort out some more and record them."

Liu Shiyu couldn't help but exclaim, "You are truly a genius! You can come up with such a wonderful melody just by thinking. Many professionals who have studied music for many years still have to touch and try out each chord on an instrument when writing songs. Those who can compose directly in their minds are probably very rare."

Chen Cheng smiled and said, "What genius? Even if you plagiarize so many songs and try to make it in the music industry, you might not be able to beat Jay Chou. Jay Chou has one or two representative works, while Jay Chou has every single one."

However, the thought of Jay Chou made Chen Cheng feel much more at ease. Jay Chou has sung so many great songs and written so many songs for others, and no one suspects that this guy is a reincarnated person, so he shouldn't have that risk.

By the end of this week, Renren.com had surpassed three million users.

According to authoritative data from the education authorities, there are currently about ten million students enrolled in universities across the country, and if postgraduate students are included, the number is just over ten million.

With three million users, Renren.com's popularity among college students is second only to QQ and Baidu.

QQ and Baidu were once the top-ranked products in terms of user numbers for many years. Nowadays, college students may have different priorities; some like to play games, some like to chat, and some like to explore novelty. But almost everyone relies on QQ and Baidu.

Now, Renren.com has fallen behind them and is starting to work hard to close the gap.

However, with the explosive growth in the number of users, the pressure on the servers is also increasing.

On Sunday, a minor incident occurred: Northern Netcom users experienced severe lag when accessing the campus network, with some homepages taking tens of seconds to load.

Tang Jiakai noticed this situation and said to Chen Cheng, "President Chen, we have a growing number of users in the north, and we need to find a way to solve their latency problem."

Delay in the North?

Chen Cheng was slightly taken aback, but quickly recalled the special circumstances of this era.

China Telecom in the south, China Netcom in the north, and there's also a hopeless case called China Railcom.

This is the current landscape of internet service providers.

Moreover, this pattern was only formed after the restructuring in May of this year.

The restructuring plan involved splitting the telecommunications business into two companies, one in the south called China Telecom Group and the other in the north called China Netcom Group.

The formation of the "Southern Telecom and Northern Netcom" pattern had a long-lasting impact on the Chinese internet.

Due to limitations in their respective server and fiber optic infrastructure, as well as commercial competition between the two sides, interoperability between the northern and southern networks has always been a thorny issue. If you are accessing China Unicom from China Telecom, or vice versa, your network will be incredibly slow.

Whether it's a website, a game, or other online software, they all face the same problem: you have to choose a place to house your server, and after you house it, you have to choose a network connection to access it.

Then another problem arises: wherever your server is located, the user's data will be uploaded there. If it's all in the south and all using China Telecom, the speed is generally not a problem, but if it's a China Unicom user in the north, then latency is inevitable.

The website is somewhat acceptable because it doesn't have high latency requirements; at worst, the page will load a little slowly, but it will eventually open eventually.

But the game is in trouble.

There isn't a real-time multiplayer platform yet, but online card and board game platforms like Lianzhong also have latency requirements. You can't have four people playing mahjong together, where the other three have been playing for a minute and the fourth hasn't even reacted yet.

Therefore, at this stage, the platform will directly indicate whether the server is from China Telecom or China Unicom. You should choose the server corresponding to your network type.

Needless to say, for PK-oriented online games like Legend of Mir, latency is a fatal problem, whether it's PK with other players or grinding monsters and fighting bosses.

This unique historical context also gave rise to a product called a game accelerator, which serves the purpose of providing dual-line access and creating its own handshake protocol with China Telecom and China Unicom.

If a China Netcom user wants to access a China Telecom server, they need the help of an accelerator. The accelerator uses the China Netcom network to connect to your data, and then uses its own China Telecom network to connect to the server's data. It then exchanges the data, making it faster than a direct connection because it goes through an intermediary process.

The problem with the school's intranet now is that all its servers are located in Jiangcheng, using the China Telecom network, so users in the south will have much faster access speeds.

When Renren (校内网) first started developing, it relied on the social networks of Jiangnan University students. Being a southern university, it naturally had a larger southern student population than a northern one, resulting in a high proportion of southern users. However, now that the overall user base has grown, the number of northern users is also surging, putting increasing pressure on their access. This is no longer a problem that can be solved simply by increasing bandwidth.

Currently, no one has been able to solve the dual-line problem of a large platform.

In this era, an online game may have many different regions, and each region has different servers. For example, the first region of Legend of Mir may have eight different servers, which means that each server is a closed Legend of Mir world.

This can be considered one solution: indicating to players whether the server is from China Telecom or China Unicom, allowing players to choose which closed and independent game world to enter based on their own situation.

However, the website does not have this solution.

Renren.com is a social network composed of three million people. It is impossible to divide them into two independent worlds just because of the different telecommunications in the north and south, with southerners playing on southern servers and northerners playing on northern servers.

If the school's intranet doesn't have a photo album, it's fine, since text content doesn't take up much space and there shouldn't be any serious lag.

However, what initially attracted users to the school's intranet was precisely its online electronic photo album.

Chen Cheng suddenly understood why MSN had already had video calling functionality, but QQ, which always liked to imitate others, hadn't followed suit immediately.

It's very likely that they already had video chat technology, but the problem is that they haven't solved the connection issue between the north and south lines.

It's unacceptable for video calls between people from the South and the North to be so choppy; the user experience would be so terrible that it's better not to do it at all.

So, how can this problem be solved?

Chen Cheng thought about it and realized there were only two ways.

First, the data center must be connected to both China Telecom and China Unicom. Second, the server must be able to perfectly coordinate the two networks based on the user's IP address. When a user from China Telecom comes, the server should be matched with China Telecom's line, and when a user from China Unicom comes, the server should be connected with China Unicom's line.

However, Chen Cheng asked Tang Jiakai, and he had never heard of anyone having such technology. Even if they did, they certainly wouldn't disclose it publicly.

Chen Cheng was a little frustrated; not having the relevant skills was a real problem.

If you want to implement this function yourself, you need to find a team that is proficient in servers to write a dual-line server program.

This involves underlying architecture issues, and it must be extremely difficult to develop; it's definitely not something a group of college students could figure out.

Besides this solution, there's another, rather cumbersome one: simply set up two servers.

Let's say the campus network server is packaged into a single computer, and this computer is connected to a China Telecom network cable. Then, we'll prepare another computer and connect it to a China Unicom network cable.

Of course, since the users are connected, it is necessary to ensure that the data between the two computers is synchronized in real time.

This means that two servers need to be set up locally, and then the two servers are directly connected and synchronized via cable.

The cost behind this is that server costs will definitely double.

Fortunately, the bandwidth doesn't need to be doubled; it's simply a matter of dividing the bandwidth in half and then allocating it according to the actual situation.

The cost of simply adding a server isn't too high, so Chen Cheng gritted his teeth and said to Tang Jiakai, "How about this, I'll talk to the server hosting company and see if we can add a China Netcom line, then copy a set of data to the new server, and then the server data will be updated in real time on both sets of servers simultaneously."

Tang Jiakai's eyes lit up: "That's a great idea!"

After saying that, she thought about the cost and said somewhat nervously, "Wouldn't that be too expensive? We'd have to add so many more servers all at once..."

Chen Cheng said, "We'll have to spend this money sooner or later, so it's definitely better to spend it sooner rather than later. Although having two servers wastes twice the storage space, the data on the two servers can be backed up for each other. If any problems arise, at least the data security will be guaranteed."

"That's true!"

Tang Jiakai nodded in agreement.

He has participated in many cases of internet attack and defense. In some cases, after the database of a website server was deleted, even if it was re-launched, all the data was basically lost.

However, if there is a backup, not only can the data be preserved, but the operation will not be greatly affected, just like an airplane with two engines, even if one engine fails, it can still fly.

Chen Cheng then exclaimed, "If we solve the dual-line access problem, we will likely take the lead over our domestic counterparts in this area, and in the future, when we encounter other applications, we may even be able to gain a competitive edge."

Tang Jiakai nodded and asked Chen Cheng, "Mr. Chen, have you ever thought about setting up your own data center? With server hosting, the smaller the scale, the more money you save, and the larger the scale, the more wasteful it is. If you have your own data center, the cost should be reduced a lot."

Chen Cheng said, "Next month, I can't come up with that much money this month. Let others earn what they can first. Once I solve my funding problem, I'll immediately start working on my own data center."

At this point, Chen Cheng instructed Chen Wei: "Senior Chen Wei, hurry up and write a script. If a user loads a page of ours too slowly, automatically reduce the resolution of the images on that page by one level."

(End of this chapter)