Steam delivers 20 petabytes of data per month

[omar little]

From the steamworks page aimed at developers http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/ (in the PDF brochure thing)

1100 games.

140 million Steam achievements unlocked.

1 million active Steam Community groups.

10 million Steam Community profiles.

237 countries.

25 million accounts.

2.7 million concurrent peak players.

21 languages.

500 million minutes played per day.

13 billion minutes played per month.

750 terabytes delivered daily during Holiday Sale.

200+ gigabytes/second of bandwidth.

20 petabytes of data delivered per month.

Steam is so awesome I'm willing to pay extra to get games on it rather than retail

[Angmaar]

That's a lot of bandwidth!

[yngndrw]

Wait, every day people play Steam games for a total of 950 years ? :o

[Nightcover]

Ohh, so there is 26 days a month?

[W1zzard]

not impressed .. i expected more traffic

[saaya]

25 million accounts = 20pb traffic per month?
thats less than 1mb per account per month? 0_o

[Psykocyber]

25 million accounts = 20pb traffic per month?
thats less than 1mb per account per month? 0_o

No, its ~43 MB
1 PB = 1048576 GB

1048576 GB / 25000000 = 42.9 MB ~ 43MB

[weston]

No, its ~43 MB
1 PB = 1048576 GB

1048576 GB / 25000000 = 42.9 MB ~ 43MB

it's 20PB though, so wouldn't it be 20 * 1048576 GB / 25000000 = 858MB

that's quite a bit, almost a gig per person

[saaya]

No, its ~43 MB
1 PB = 1048576 GB

1048576 GB / 25000000 = 42.9 MB ~ 43MB

oh i forgot tb
but your numbers are wrong as well, arent they?
1pb = 1.000 tb = 1.000.000 gb

20pb for 25million accounts
thats 20 million gb for 25 million accounts
20/25=.8
thats 800mb per account then... still not that much... but considering that not every account is active... does it say how many accounts are active?

13 billion minutes played per month

13.000.000.000 minutes played per month
20.000.000.000 mega bytes per month

1.5mega byte per minute per player?
thats 25kb/s, right?
bandwidth, so its upload and download, sounds about right...

and yeah, its not that much... considering that many people buy 10gb games on steam, usually one per month... i would have expected more... does the minutes played stat include single player gaming as well? that would explain it

[Lmui]

-snip-
and yeah, its not that much... considering that many people buy 10gb games on steam, usually one per month... i would have expected more... does the minutes played stat include single player gaming as well? that would explain it

Single player would make sense since I can see whenever my steam friends load up MW2 and other games regardless of if they're playing online or not.

[HotGore]

How many active accounts do they have? I have 4 accounts, many for servers and stuff. I only really use 1 account.

[ethernal]

The 200 gigabytes per second number seemed a bit high.. and the numbers provided don't really add up.

20 petabytes per month is only averaging 64 gigabits per second; 750 terabytes per day is only 71 gigabits per second. That means 8 gigabytes/second and ~9 gigabytes/second as opposed to 200 gigabytes per second. I wouldn't doubt that at certain times of day their bandwidth peaks at 200 gigabits a second but I doubt that it ever gets anywhere close to 200 gigabytes. Network transfer speed is almost universally measured in bits and not bytes (on the basis that bytes are technically a construct of an invididual piece of hardware and not a universal constant whereas a bit has a strict definition - even though the 8-bit byte is now a de-facto standards).

More than likely the marketing folks that made the brochure were given 200 gigabits - and naturally thought the "silly IT folks" made a mistake and changed it to bytes.

[xman01]

it's all about the wow factor.

wow look at the big numbers. steam must be good. i shall create a steam account and buy a game too.

[omar little]

The 200 gigabytes per second number seemed a bit high.. and the numbers provided don't really add up.

20 petabytes per month is only averaging 64 gigabits per second; 750 terabytes per day is only 71 gigabits per second. That means 8 gigabytes/second and ~9 gigabytes/second as opposed to 200 gigabytes per second. I wouldn't doubt that at certain times of day their bandwidth peaks at 200 gigabits a second but I doubt that it ever gets anywhere close to 200 gigabytes. Network transfer speed is almost universally measured in bits and not bytes (on the basis that bytes are technically a construct of an invididual piece of hardware and not a universal constant whereas a bit has a strict definition - even though the 8-bit byte is now a de-facto standards).

More than likely the marketing folks that made the brochure were given 200 gigabits - and naturally thought the "silly IT folks" made a mistake and changed it to bytes.

i think 200GB/s is the max bandwith for all their servers combined (there are a lot of content servers all over the world)
750TB/day was during the massive christmas sale (when I bought 40 games for $100 )

[randomizer]

That would probably exceed my bandwidth cap.

[ethernal]

i think 200GB/s is the max bandwith for all their servers combined (there are a lot of content servers all over the world)
750TB/day was during the massive christmas sale (when I bought 40 games for $100 )

If they're paying for 1600 gigabits per second of uplink and they're using an average of 71 gigabits per second on peak days then they need to fire their network director. Especially since they have a large non-critical link (game downloads) that can be limited prior to cutting into critical bandwidth (active games) should an unusual level of peak bandwidth overwhelm their circuits. The difference we're talking about here is several millions of dollars a month and not a trivial sum.

200 gigabits per second is a much more plausible figure.

[tdream]

The math in this thread is soo bad...

[Hornet331]

indeed...

[Psykocyber]

@Saaya, yes. There were wrong. Forgot the 20 PB part.
0.8388608 GB is my final answer !

[breakfromyou]

That would probably exceed my bandwidth cap.

many times over, you poor aussie.

Steam is pretty nice these days. I like what it has turned into. Years ago I thought it did have potential, just loaded with bugs. Surprisingly enough they made things better--with less bugs?!

[Kurz]

We'll Steam is probably the only place where my connection gets nearly maxed out.

[zalbard]

The math in this thread is soo bad...

20 PB = 20480 TB = 20971520 GB = 21474836480 MB
25 million accounts
858,992 MB/account a month
Assuming there are 30 days a month (for instance): 28,63 MB per account a day
13000000000000 minutes played per month (assuming 1 billion = 100000000000)
0,00165 MB/minute = 1.69 KB/minute (too low, odd)

[Particle]

MB per player minute doesn't mean anything, so don't get turned off by it. Player minutes are concurrent.

Bandwidth and transfer are nearly exclusively quoted using powers of ten definitions, meaning 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. It's rarely presented where they mean 1 GB = 1 GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes). Overall, Zalbard's numbers make sense. I'd expect most accounts to be dark at a given time, and that's clearly the case since daily peak player counts are only on the order of two million. Real bandwidth used per account per month might be something closer to 4x+ the average received when calculating the share for each user account across their entire system. The utilization of the system is highly irregular though. Stating an average per account is only useful for statistical analysis instead of being a realistic indicator of a typical user. A typical user is likely to only need updates or new games they purchase, which means one month they might be heavy and the next very light.

[trn]

I wanna what % of that data was actually requested by steam users, and how much was just crap and ads that they uploaded to their clients.

[Lmui]

Some games have big patches, bugfixes etc. For example TF2, when updates such as soldier vs demoman or something come out, a huge number of people update their TF2 over the course of a day or two so I'm not surprised at all by the peak numbers.