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Posted on November 8, 2022
With millions of people uploading videos to Instagram's servers every day, hard drive space needs to be constantly increased. In fact, Instagram engineers already received a notification stating that this issue was becoming a problem; there wasn't enough space for so many videos.
Faced with the threat of having their servers overloaded with billions of reels, they created a method to reduce file size and improve quality, without needing to upgrade any hardware or add more disks.
In early 2021, Instagram gave a 12-month deadline to find a solution, and engineers devised a system where multiple encoded versions of uploaded videos could be reused. The results were astonishing:
By reusing one type of video encoding to help generate another type, computing resources were reduced on less-watched videos by 94 % and a drastically reduced amount of resources was achieved.
Thanks to the available resources, they were able to produce more advanced encodings, thus increasing the fluidity of existing videos.
Instagram uses two types of video encoding:
– Basic, compatible with all Instagram users, with less efficient compression, ideal for playback on older devices.
– Advanced, with newer compression technologies capable of delivering sharper details with fewer bits.
The first method consumed 80% of its resources, and the advanced ones only 15%
They focused on optimizing basic coding, and managed to achieve higher overall render times across all servers.
A multi-month project that is invisible to users, but which makes it clear how important it is to have engineers constantly thinking about every detail.
An engineer over 40, founder of WWWhatsnew and a passionate editor. I've been working in the technology world since 2000, and ever since then I haven't stopped paying attention to all the latest developments in the sector, news that we tell you about at WWWhatsnew.com.
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