We serve 6GB of avatars in a typical hour. Looking at a representative window of 1 hour of GitLab traffic, we saw almost 6GB of data move over the wire, or 144GB a day. Based on experiments with downscaling a representative user avatar, we estimated that we could reduce this to a mere 13GB a day on average, saving 130GB of bandwidth each day!

Scaling down: How we shrank image transfers by 93 percent via @mttkay https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/11/02/scaling-down-how-we-prototyped-an-image-scaler-at-gitlab/ “We serve 6GB of avatars in a typical hour.”