WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

> One complicating factor here is that raw video is surprisingly high bandwidth.

It's weird to be living in a world where this is a surprise but here we are.

Nice write up though. Web sockets has a number of nonsensical design decisions, but I wouldn't have expected that this is the one that would be chewing up all your cpu.

> It's weird to be living in a world where this is a surprise but here we are.

I think it's because the cost of it is so abstracted away with free streaming video all across the web. Once you take a look at the egress and ingress sides you realize how quickly it adds up.

I think it's just rare for a lot of people to be handling raw video. Most people interact with highly efficient (lossy) codecs on the web.

I was surprised when calculating and sizing the shared memory for my Gaming VM for use with "Looking-Glass". At 165hz 2k HDR it's many gigabytes per second, that's why HDMI and DisplayPort is specced really high

I always knew video was "expensive", but my mark for what expensive meant was a good few orders of magnitude off when I researched the topic for a personal project.

I can easily imagine the author being in a similar boat, knowing that it isn't cheap, but then not realizing that expensive in this context truly does mean expensive until they actually started seeing the associated costs.

Even compressed video is massive data though.

I’m so confused… they were sending uncompressed video to an AWS server?

If so, they deserve a $1M bill.

I'd still like to get a looking glass. What did you end up with?

It was on a loopback interface. The problem was CPU usage, not bandwidth costs.

Let me rephrase. They were processing uncompressed video via a loopback interface?