How do social media companies like twitter or youtube not run out of space for posts?

skomposzczet@vlemmy.net to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 141 points –

I know memory is fairly cheap but e.g. there are millions of new videos on youtube everyday, each probably few hundred MBs to few GBs. It all has to take enormous amount of space. Not to mention backups.

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I believe they store and that’s why it processes lowest res first and works up

It's transposed on the fly, this is a fairly simple lambda function in AWS so whatever the GCP equivalent is. You can't up sample potato spec, the reason it looks like shit is due to bandwidth and the service determining a lower speed than is available.

Are you suggesting they don’t store different versions? This suggests they do.

At a certain point the cost of compute is going to be cheaper than the cost of storage.

Do you have a source? My instinct is the opposite. Compute scales with users but storage scales with videos

Consider two cases:

  • the most recent MrBeast video receiving millions of views from all kinds of devices (some of which require specific formats)
  • a random video of a cat uploaded 5 years ago, total view count: 3

Design a system that optimizes for total cost.

No source but I imagine the amount of videos must be outpacing the amount of users. Users come and go but every uploaded video stays forever.

I think you might be underestimating how many users YouTube has! According to this, 720,000 hours per day are uploaded versus 1,000,000,000 hours are watched per day!

No assumptions about specific usage. Just that at a certain point or in certain scenarios (that I’m sure YouTube’s engineers fully understand), there’s a point where one becomes more cost effective than the other.

Those are pretty incredible numbers though, wow. The scale of that usage is insane.

That response is almost 10 years old and completely outdated. I've designed and maintained a national media service and can confirm that on the fly transcoding is both cheaper and easier. It does make sense to store different formats of videos that are popular at the minute but in the medium to long term streams are transcoded.

Sure it’s old but the stats I posted in a lower comment show that at YouTube’s scale, it makes sense to store.