So I use SmugMug to host my photos as they have some really cool features and people there. I also started following a few of them on Twitter, and there was a tweet that just made my head hurt, so I sat down to do the math on it. Okay, I also used Wolfram Alpha to help with it.
The Tweet from Baldy stated:
“Whoa! Vincent LaForet‘s new Canon Mark IV vid on SmugMug used over 20 terabytes of bandwidth in 300,000 views in 14 hours.”
So I started to try and figure out how many megabits/second that was so I could compare it to typical network connectivity that I am more familiar with, 100BaseT or Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet. Well it just became amazing.
- First I converted 20TB to megabits
- 20TB= 20,000,000,000,000 bytes = 160,000,000,000,000 bits =
160,000,000 megabits.
Yes, that is 160 Billion megabits
- 20TB= 20,000,000,000,000 bytes = 160,000,000,000,000 bits =
- The next thing was to convert hours to seconds
- 14 hours = 840 minutes = 50,400 seconds
- Now to convert to megabits/second
- 160,000,000 megabits/50,400 seconds = 3,174 megabits/second = 3.2 gigabits/second.
So that is pretty freaking fast at to how quickly the data is coming out.
Wolfram Alpha had cool comparisons to put it in context. It is approximately equal to the text content of the Library of Congress. It is approximately equal to 1/8th of the estimated data content of the surface web (~~ 170 TB ).
Dang no wonder they are in need of 2 TB of flash memory for a server. You can see the picture and Don MacAskill CEO of SmugMug here http://bit.ly/3HlXzH
I was wondering who would do the math! When it went live at midnight neither I nor Vincent could believe the numbers we were seeing, and honestly I was holding my breath wrt system uptime. Gizmodo and Engadget embedded the 640-pixel version but they also provided a direct link to the 1080p version, which helped things go insane.
Fortunately, very few of those bits went through our data centers as Akamai did the heavy lifting. I can’t say enough about those guys, they almost never let us down.