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There are diminishing returns after 1GBps.

I previously had 10Gbps symmetrical fiber[1], and it was simply impossible to saturate without running a speed test against another customer.

Servers were generally not fast enough to make use of that speed. XBOX downloads would sometimes peak near 1Gbps, but not sustain.

The main issue, I suppose, is that disk drives are not fast enough, or at least, not fast enough relative to their size. You can have 500MBps (40Gbps) hard drives, but your cloud provider has 50-100 customers at least accessing that drive, so your share of the straw is fairly small.

More pedestrian uses can't possibly benefit from such bandwidth either. 4k Blu-rays max out at 128Mbps. I suppose we could have 3D 8k120 streams taking 4Gbps (128*4*4*2). Maybe you can just go uncompressed, so 382Gbps (2*7680*4320*120*48), but that seems like it probably causes more trouble than compressing/decompressing, since it will be rather hard to buffer, and small hiccups will lose huge amounts of data.

In short, I think it wouldn't be substantially different than having a good 1Gbps symmetrical internet. It might allow Stadia like experiences to be really good, but those still have latency issues.

[1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/




You shouldn't actually need that much disk bandwidth to run something like a reddit though. 192 GB of RAM (which gaming motherboards can support) costs under $1k and should be enough to keep several weeks worth of threads warm. On the other hand, a large thread might need to transfer ~100 kB, so at 10k requests/second, that's ~8 Gb/s. I can't find stats on how many page views/second they get, but I imagine it's more than 10k/s and less than 100k/s, so presumably somewhere between 10Gb/s and 80Gb/s you have more than you need for that use case.




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