Optimization of File Allocation for Video Sharing Servers Emad Abd-Elrahman and Hossam Afifi Wireless Networks and Multimedia Services Department, Telecom SudParis (ex. INT), France. 9, rue Charles Fourier, 91011 Evry Cedex, France. {Emad.Abd_Elrahman, Hossam.Afifi@it-sudparis.eu} Abstract—This paper focuses on one of the most used short video servers on the Internet, it is YouTube. YouTube has the third rank of the internet sites related to its traffic transactions. In this work, firstly, we study the effect of the huge numbers of viewers, hits, users and files on the video sharing servers’ behaviours by analyzing some recent statistics about YouTube. Then, we propose an optimization for file allocation procedures in general and then we apply the algorithm to some examples of YouTube videos. This solution improves the number of hits related to those kinds of servers over the Internet. Finally, we try to optimize the revenue from the file allocation and propose a hybrid solution for the file hosting or server caching systems. Index Terms—Servers hits; Social networks; File allocation optimizations. I. INTRODUCTION OWADAYS, many servers use short videos as a business model and benefit from a high degree of interest because of their ability to easily diffuse these clips to end users. Users can share their own videos, download available videos and also create their own profiles to know the rating of their videos evaluated by others. Many servers like YouTube [1], Google [6], Yahoo [12], Dailymotion [13] and others have a good ranking as presented by Alexa [8].This evaluation shows the ranking of content depending on uploads and downloads and on the number of videos uploaded by others. According to the last statistics showed by Alexa, YouTube has a great and increasing interest as it was ranked third site out of the ranked 500 sites with the highest traffic hits over the Internet. We will focus in this paper on this server as a good case study for video sharing servers. Although Yahoo has an advanced rank than YouTube (the second site by Alexa), YouTube is more famous for short videos transfer. Dailymotion also occupies the rank 68 by the same measurement site Alexa. In this paper, we try to analyse the network architecture of these services and present several enhancements that provide an optimization in important parameters such as response time and storage amount. We show that these optimizations, used at a very large scale, provide really important improvement in the global efficiency of the service as seen by the user and by the provider. The rest of this paper is organized as follows; section II introduces the history of YouTube and some important statistics, section III discusses the social networking concept and its data centres design, section IV presents our proposal for file allocation optimization, section V shows our algorithm evaluation, section VI draws our attention towards the problem of file hosting on YouTube and its proposed solutions, section VII presents related work and finally the conclusion for our work and its future directions are presented in section VIII. II. HISTORY OF YOUTUBE YouTube is four years old, and it is already the third most visited website in the world in 2009. YouTube was founded in February 2005 and it became so immensely popular in a short period of time. It allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. Everyone can watch videos on YouTube, upload, download and also create its own profile on this server to pursue their videos statistics. People can see first-hand accounts of current events and find videos about their hobbies and interests. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow [14]. In YouTube's history, USA in 2007 registered the largest number of hits for this site, more than 15,500,000 clicks in the process of measuring the hits of this server related to USA only [2]. In the press of December 2008, YouTube is the leader for online video community that allows people to discover, watch and share originally created videos. So, now YouTube has more than 100 million viewers, which represents two out of three Internet users who watched online video. Overall, nearly 150 million U.S. Net users watched an average of 96 videos that month. YouTube fans watched some 5.9 billion videos in December 2008[15].By the end of 2008, YouTube accounted for 2.13% of all UK Internet visits compared to 2.11% for Live Mail. During the same week, YouTube was the third most visited website in the UK behind Google UK and Facebook, while Live Mail ranked fourth. And in the recent news for 2009, YouTube.com accounted for 1 out of every 3 U.S. online videos viewed in January. In Germany, 28 million online video viewers watch more than 3 billion videos in December 2008, the statistics in January 2009 indicating that 28.5 million German Internet users viewed a video online in December 2008, up 10 percent versus the previous year [7]. The final press in USA indicates that YouTube Attracts 100 Million U.S. viewers [5]. In brief, the uploaded rate to YouTube was six hours of video every minute in 2007. Then it grew to eight hours per minute, then 10 hours per minute, then 13 hours per minute. In 2008, it became 15 hours of video uploaded every N 978-1-4244-6273-5/09/$26.00 ©2009 IEEE Authorized licensed use limited to: Telecom and Management Sud Paris. Downloaded on January 21, 2010 at 07:38 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. hal-00682908, version 1 - 27 Mar 2012 Author manuscript, published in "NTMS 2009 (2009) Emad Abd-Elrahman and Hossam Afifi"