How big are porn sites?

A well-known old saying that the Internet was created for pornography. Increasing connection speeds around the world, online video broadcasting, video chats and live chat, traffic optimization, huge repositories and trouble-free hosting are just the results of porn industry requests.

According to a Google-owned advertising network DoubleClick, which tracks visitors by cookies, there are dozens of pornographic sites among the 500 most visited sites on the network. Xvideos, the world's largest porn site, gets 4.4 billion page views per month, which is three times more than CNN or ESPN, and two times more than Reddit. LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8 and Pornhub are huge websites whose attendance is lower than just giants like Google or Facebook.
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Of course, several differences should be noted, which should be taken into account when comparing the attendance of pornographic resources. The main difference between the porn sites from the usual - this is the time that the visitor spends on them. On an ordinary news site, an average visit lasts 3-6 minutes, enough to read one or several articles, and the visitor is delayed by 15-20 minutes on the porn resource. The content of a regular website is text or images that do not require the transfer of relatively large amounts of data, while the average visitor easily spends 100 megabytes of traffic per visit on a video broadcast.

But even with these features, the amount of data transferred is amazing: Xvideos alone transfers 29 petabytes per month or 50 gigabytes per second. At peak, Xvideos is experiencing a load of 1 terabit per second. For comparison: the Internet channel between New York and London is only 15 terabits per second.

YouPorn, the second largest porn site on the planet, shared information about themselves that is different from the statistics of the DoubleClick advertising network. YouPorn stores over 100 terabytes of pornographic material and receives more than 100 million page views per day. In 24 hours, 950 terabytes of data are transmitted, mostly this is a video stream. A month results in at least 28 petabytes of transmitted traffic; due to peaks, jumps from 35 to 40 petabytes per month are possible. At its peak, YouPorn generates 4000 pages per second and transmits 100 gigabytes or 800 gigabits of network traffic per second. This is equivalent to transferring 10 dual-layer DVDs per second.

For servicing such queries, Redis DBMS and MySQL are used for administrative needs in managing and adding data in a Redis cluster. The site used mainly Perl with MySQL, but in 2011 everything was rewritten in PHP using Redis. Redis receives 300,000 requests per second, 8–15 gigabytes of data are saved per hour (logs of visitors, their behavior, etc.). Nginx with HAProxy and Varnish is used as a web server for load balancing. YouPorn owners say that such a system can take twice the load - up to 200 million page views per day.

YouPorn did not receive information about their computing power, but judging by the IP addresses of the site content delivery system, they use the services of a cloud hoster with a large data center and peering from Level 3.

To understand what 800 gigabits per second mean, remember that only half-exabyte of traffic per day or about 50 terabits per second is transmitted via the Internet per day. In other words, a regular porn site can receive at its peak 2% of all world traffic. There are dozens of sites comparable in size to YouPorn, and hundreds that receive similar volumes of traffic. It is no exaggeration to estimate the traffic in 30% of all transmitted data on the network.
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upd: MechanisM gave a presentation about the internal infrastructure of high-load sites of the company Manwin, which owns PornHub, YouPorn and a number of other pornographic resources.