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by natural219 505 days ago
This is incredible.

119 million posts, x ~10MB per picture,

is like 1,200 petabytes? 1.2 exabytes?

Am I missing something here... this seems very impressive.

6 comments

I believe Dan said yesterday? It costs around 4k a month. Unsure if he’s talking cad or us. Honestly more impressed it’s only that much.
More like 1 petabyte, no?

    iex(5)> mb = 119000000 * 10
    1190000000
    iex(6)> mb / 1000 / 1000
    1190.0
I’m making an assumption, but I would guess most of the images being shared are about a tenth of that.
Images and videos, though to be fair, the limit for both is 15 MB.

And I think it's a safe assumption there's some ffmpeg / imagemagick running somewhere that reduces the size even further before serving it to others.

Each instance can set it's own size limits.
The correct result of 119 million * 10MB is 1.19 PB.

Also the images on the first page of the author's own account average only 157kB, bringing your estimate to 18.6 TB...

pxscdn.com resolves to Digital Ocean, if he's using their S3-compatible storage, that's $372/mo + $0.01 per GB downloaded

You are off by some orders of magnitude.
More like 1MB per JPEG picture
Not even. Instagram photos are roughly 50kb-200kb for jpg’s.
if you compress it properly for a fast web experience, you'll probably be better 10KB-100KB
Those are transfer sizes, not sizes of the data at rest. Even transferred, the `srcset` for this image I picked at random includes a 178KB version; there's certainly a higher quality version stored, if not the original upload, something closer to it.

https://www.instagram.com/pet/p/C327eIguGRL/?img_index=1