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A real-world example

The second largest porn site on the web, YouPorn, was kind enough to furnish us with some real-world facts and figures. You’ll be glad (or scared) to know that the estimated DoubleClick Ad Planner figures are actually quite a lot lower than reality.

YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes per month, which means our 29PB estimate for Xvideos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month.

It gets better! At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.

On the software-side of things, YouPorn’s primary data store is 100% Redis, with MySQL used as an admin tool to manage and add data to the Redis cluster. The site used to be primarily programmed in Perl with a MySQL backend, but in 2011 Perl was switched out for PHP and MySQL replaced with Redis. Nginx acts as the HTTP server, with both HAProxy and Varnish both used to load balance.

The Redis server deals with 300,000 queries per second, and between 8-15GB of data is logged every hour (visitor logs, behavior data, and so on). We’re told that this software stack should be capable of scaling up to 200 million views per day.

Sadly, YouPorn couldn’t tell us about its hardware infrastructure. Judging by the IP addresses of the YouPorn content delivery network (CDN), it’s probably not hosted by a cloud provider like Amazon, but rather in a large data center somewhere, with peering provided by Level 3.

To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

The internet really is for porn.

Read more about the world of submarine fiber optic cables (which carry all of that porn)