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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

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

        • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            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
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              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.

        • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          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.