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Posted by NC on 06/12/07 17:52
On Jun 12, 5:27 am, cbmeeks <cbme...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am writing my own family photo sharing site that
> I hope to take public (like so many others). Anyway,
> currently, when the user uploads a picture, I store
> the picture outside my htdocs folder and record the
> image details in a MySQB db. When you browse the
> picture, I read the record and build the image by
> sending an image/jpeg header.
>
> Seriously though, if I take this public and get
> extremely lucky and millions of photos are uploaded,
> would this be the best method?
>
> I've read pros and cons of storing images in a database.
> I've read about Flickr, SmugMug, Photobucket having
> HUNDREDS of millions to over a BILLION images stored!
>
> Obviously, load balancing plays into this but what
> other secrets do you think they use?
Separating (static) pictures from other (dynamic) content. Say, you
have two servers, one with PHP/MySQL (let's call it www.yoursite.com),
another with nothing but Apache (content.yoursite.com), optimized for
serving static images. The application residing on www.yoursite.com
saves images onto content.yoursite.com and records their full URLs
(http://content.yoursite.com/path/file.jpg) in its database. When
content.yoursite.com gets low on available disk space, you put up a
new server (content2.yoursite.com) for writing and start filling it up
with pictures, while content.yoursite.com still remains accessible for
reading. You can continue to add new content*.yoursite.com servers as
you go. Dynamically generated HTML gets served from www.yoursite.com
(which may eventually outgrow a single server and morph into a server
cluster), static images, from content*.yoursite.com.
A slight variation of this approach is that multiple servers are open
for writing at any given time; images are written onto a randomly
chosen server. This helps ensure that highly popular content will be
spread between multiple servers and can thus be served faster.
Yet another possibility is to hide your application behind a layer of
caching proxies...
> One thing I worry about is my file system. I have
> something like:
>
> pix
> -----user1
> -------------thumbs
> -----user2
> -------------thumbs
There's absolutely no need for the file structure to replicate your
database structure...
Cheers,
NC
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