Netflix has been serving up to 200 Gbps of TLS-encrypted video from a single server since 2020. Nonetheless, the company aims to double the bandwidth to 400 Gbps. During his presentation at the EuroBSD 2021 conference (
via HardwareLuxx), Andrew Gallatin, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, detailed the challenges of pushing the bandwidth envelope on its FreeBSD-based servers.
Netflix turned to AMD's EPYC Rome processors to achieve its goal. The company equipped its server with the EPYC 7502P, which wields 32 Zen 2 cores with a 2.5 GHz base clock and 3.35 GHz boost clock. More importantly, the 32-core beast offers up to 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, good for about 250 GBps of bandwidth or around 2 Tbps in networking units. Netflix paired the EPYC 7502P with 256GB of DDR4-3200 memory, with a total memory bandwidth of up to 150 GBps, or 1.2 Tbps in networking units.
For storage, Netflix's AMD-powered server utilizes 18 Western Digital WD SN720 2TB NVMe SSDs. It's also equipped with a pair of Nvidia's Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx network adapters that communicate through a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface. Initially, Netflix was only getting 240 Gbps out of the server, primarily due to the limitation on the memory.
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