I get what you’re saying, but honestly 2gbps of traffic is also nothing in 2024.
I think a ~$100k server can push something like 1-2tbps. That’d be enough bandwidth for 100k users.
I’m not in the streaming industry, but that’s at least what I’ve seen from Netflix’s presentations. The main bottleneck for streaming servers these days isn’t even the network cards, it’s the bandwidth on your 16-24 channel DDR5 server RAM interfaces.
Netflix presentation from 2021 about their 1tbps servers:
And what ISP will give you a connection with terabits in upload speed?
Probably you’re thinking about placing the machine in a data center, I’m not familiar with that.
However with that price I wouldn’t say that “it’s nothing”. Even just the hardware, where I live it’s the price of a house, and people barely afford it even with a loan.
It’s probably not much to well running companies, but here we are speaking about individuals and relatively smaller groups, ran by donations and not for profit.
And the main bottleneck there is, is it really the RAM? How? Are they not touching storage and keeping everything in a ramdisk?
Yeah, video streaming can’t really be run on donations like Lemmy, that’s true.
I think the presentation discusses it, but basically, if you have 20+ ssds in your server, trying to read them all and process the file system will mean you’re copying around too much data at once in your ram. A 1gb file might require like 5-10gb of data traffic in ram while the CPU is processing it due to copies and checks, etc. Ram can’t handle the resulting 10tbps of ram bandwidth needed. The optimization that Netflix is doing is to use pcie to send files directly over the pcie bus from the ssd to the network cards, skipping the cpu and ram altogether.
I get what you’re saying, but honestly 2gbps of traffic is also nothing in 2024.
I think a ~$100k server can push something like 1-2tbps. That’d be enough bandwidth for 100k users.
I’m not in the streaming industry, but that’s at least what I’ve seen from Netflix’s presentations. The main bottleneck for streaming servers these days isn’t even the network cards, it’s the bandwidth on your 16-24 channel DDR5 server RAM interfaces.
Netflix presentation from 2021 about their 1tbps servers:
https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf
And what ISP will give you a connection with terabits in upload speed?
Probably you’re thinking about placing the machine in a data center, I’m not familiar with that.
However with that price I wouldn’t say that “it’s nothing”. Even just the hardware, where I live it’s the price of a house, and people barely afford it even with a loan.
It’s probably not much to well running companies, but here we are speaking about individuals and relatively smaller groups, ran by donations and not for profit.
And the main bottleneck there is, is it really the RAM? How? Are they not touching storage and keeping everything in a ramdisk?
Yeah, video streaming can’t really be run on donations like Lemmy, that’s true.
I think the presentation discusses it, but basically, if you have 20+ ssds in your server, trying to read them all and process the file system will mean you’re copying around too much data at once in your ram. A 1gb file might require like 5-10gb of data traffic in ram while the CPU is processing it due to copies and checks, etc. Ram can’t handle the resulting 10tbps of ram bandwidth needed. The optimization that Netflix is doing is to use pcie to send files directly over the pcie bus from the ssd to the network cards, skipping the cpu and ram altogether.