The Pirate Bay consumes only 2500 watts

Website thepiratebay.se is 76th in the ranking of the largest Internet sites according to Alexa version - higher than GoDaddy, Stack Overflow or WordPress. According to the estimates of the Bay administrators, recent changes in the infrastructure have reduced the power consumption of all the iron serving it from an already modest six to two and a half kilowatts. The bay today is 17 virtual machines located at different cloud hosters, several routers and diskless load balancer. Thus, The Pirate Bay is one of the “greenest” Internet sites.

The site has to serve many millions of visitors and at the same time constantly run from copyright holders, inventing new and new ways of dealing with outages and locks. It’s much easier to run lightly, and Pirate Bay administrators are constantly looking for ways to reduce dependence on any external resources. The austere design, the abandonment of the tracker and the storage of torrent files have led to the fact that now a full backup of the site’s code and data for the past six months weighs only 500 gigabytes.

It is possible to treat piracy differently, but from a technical point of view it is difficult not to admire the extent to which it is possible to optimize a distributed technology under adverse environmental conditions. A tiny Internet site coordinates tens of millions of users and gives you access to many terabytes of files on computers scattered around the world!