Interesting story from the vault of the Ocarina case study library. Social network Tagged is the third largest social network in the U.S. It has seen traffic increase 10x over the past two years. With its focus on making new friends rather than simply getting to know existing ones, it has carved out a successful niche and is building an international subscriber base of over 80 million members.
The cost of this success? Data growth. Tagged’s storage infrastructure has been doubling every single year. With 1 million new photos uploaded every single day, Tagged needed a way to expand capacity and fast.
Compression with Ocarina meant about 10 TB of additional free space, which in turn meant they could put off buying new NAS equipment by several months. The lower average image size also meant reduced bandwidth and 15%-20% reduced monthly content delivery network (CDN) costs.
The company chose to go with Ocarina’s newest specialized image reduction technique, native format optimization (NFO). This is visually lossless compression of images that nevertheless delivers significant space savings–a technology that’s perfectly suited to the social networking environment.
The other crucial benefit to reducing image size was improvements in site responsiveness. “We’re sure that using Ocarina to reduce image sizes has helped improve our page rendering times,” said company CTO Johann Schleier -Smith. “That’s a big deal because it creates a better user experience, which means improved customer loyalty and higher market share.”
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