Re:Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf]
by dangrossman on Monday September 20, 2021 @12:37AM
(#28590427)
> Video encoding is 70% of Netflix’s computing needs, running on 300,000 CPUs in over 1000 different autoscaling groups.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2017/12/4/the-eternal-cost-s...
Re:Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf]
by jsnell on Monday September 20, 2021 @03:31AM
(#28591144)
Thanks. The numbers still aren't lining up for me, but guess it can't be helped :)
They're saying that encoding a season of Stranger Things took 190k CPU-hours. That's about 20k CPU-hours per one-hour episode. If they need 300k cores round the clock, that implies they're encoding 360 hours of content every day (300k*24/20k=360). To a Netflix customer, it seems pretty obvious they don't have 360 hours of new content coming in daily.
I'm finding this hard to believe, and back of the envelope calculations don't make it look any more plausible. (Netflix gets maybe 20 hours of content per day, can smooth out any spikes over very long periods of time, and shouldn't need more than maybe a dozen different versions. There's just no way I can see how you'd need 300k cores for that amount of transcoding). Do you happen to have a source?