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.

  • mangomission@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

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

    • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • mangomission@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        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!

        • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.