Tango, photography and whatever's bleeding edge
Ine mentions that Dreamhost has become a more reliable hoster. I am actually tracking Dreamhost performance, and I can only agree.
This is the current response time of a WordPress blog on Dreamhost:
Wordpress is a database-powered PHP application, so this response time includes the MySQL queries and PHP overhead.
This is the very similar performance of a second blog on another Dreamhost server:
Continue reading ‘Dreamhost has better performance now’
Just how many pictures does Flickr receive every day? I found a way to estimate the # of images that they add to their database, and another way to get average (original) file sizes for those images. The result? Their storage growth, i.e. their upload bandwidth, and the growth rate of their storage system (how many days to reach a terabyte?)
You see here that weekends, Sundays specifically, are the most busy days for uploads. You can see peaks of almost 68.000 pictures an hour (almost 20 pictures a second). Peaks are around 22h CET (or 1 PM PDT – in California). The lowest rates (still around 20.000 photos/hour) are 12h apart: 10h CET (1 AM PDT).
The average inflow of pictures is: 38.400 photos/hour. That is around 10 photos/second, 920.000 photos/day.
And how big are those pictures? I have found a way to estimate average filesize (and maximum, while I’m at it). It’s not perfect, but quite accurate. How? That’s classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to … Anyway: these are the numbers:
On average, a picture uploaded to Flickr is 555.2 KB big. They receive files up to 7.3 MB (what number of megapixels would that be?) and quite a lot of 3MB images. My Canon 350D makes 8 megapixel images (3456 x 2304 pixels) that are between 2 and 4 MB large. But the ones I send to Flickr (after Picasa processing) are typically smaller: 1200 x 800 (300 – 600KB) or 1024 x 683 (200 – 400KB).
What happens if we multiply both numbers?
38.400 pictures/hour x 555,2 KB/pic = 21,3 GB/hour = 5,9MB/sec or 47,3 Mbps. Storagewise, this is 15,3 terabyte/month of new pictures. Thank God storage prices are dropping.
Five years ago, a server with a few hundred gigabytes of storage – one of many needed to handle uploads of member photographs – would have cost Flickr about $250,000. Today, Mr Butterfield says, “you can get a terabyte of storage for about $5,000”. (via ft.com)
Peak bandwidth usage: let’s take 60.000 pictures/hour x 3MB/pic: 180GB/hour = 50 MB/sec or 400 Mbps. This is probably still peanuts compared to their outgoing bandwidth.
Let’s compare some of the main video hosting services. Now that YouTube has been sold to Google, maybe one of these is on the shopping list of Microsoft or Yahoo!
The source file I used was recorded with my Nokia N91 phone at a concert of Billie King in the Ancienne Belgique (Brussels), at the end of their set. The cute girl you see hitting the cymbals is Isolde Lasoen, Belgium’s finest female drummer. The equally cute lead singer is Tine Reymer.
The input file is:
This means that (a) the source material was already compressed and comes from a consumer-grade, low-quality camera, so it was no DVD quality to start with and (b) the source dimensions (352 wide) are smaller than most embedded players(400-480 wide) so the movie had to be upsized, which adds some more distortion.
Size: 425 x 350
Continue reading ‘Video hosting shootout: Youtube, Google, Vimeo, MySpace …’
Who doesn’t like a good controversy? The Belgian government statistics site has just released a study on language knowledge in Belgium. This study has numbers for Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia separately. Let’s take a look:
SOURCE STATS
Can be found via the statbel page cited above: knowledge of 1, 2 or 3 languages, in the age groups <= 40 and > 40. The numbers are a bit weird (e.g. the number of people that speak NL+FR includes those who speak NL+FR+EN, so the numbers add up to something way bigger than 100%), but I recalculated them in order to make sense and be easily chartable.
Belgium: overall stats
I actually got these numbers by taking a weighted average of the separate numbers for Brussels (1 mio inhabitants), Flanders (6 mio) and Wallonia (3,3 mio). It is not 100% accurate (the population distribution below and above age 40 might be different) but gives a good approximation.
Most remarkable here: the generation gap. Multi-linguism has gone way up in the age group < 40 years, mostly thanks to more mastering of English. The occurrence of people speaking 3 languages has doubled!
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