Facebook Pictures
Slashdot linked to a presentation called “How Facebook Stores Billions of Photos” — fun facts:
Facebook efficiently stores ~6.5 billion images, in 4 or 5 sizes each, totaling ~30 billion files, and a total of 540 TB and serving 475,000 images per second at peak…
I remember when Facebook released their pictures application, and I thought “this is silly.” And then everyone I’ve ever known started adding pictures and I realized that my desire to “keep it simple, stupid” was, itself, stupid.
Now, here we are, with 6.5 BILLION IMAGES on Facebook. The truly amazing thing is that last number: almost a HALF MILLION IMAGES PER SECOND. Some people in the internet industry might say that serving that many requests per second isn’t that difficult… but I think these Facebook engineers deserve some serious, serious respect… this is tough stuff they are doing.