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How Facebook Stores Billions of Photos

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the laser-printer-and-a-warehouse-i-figure dept.

David Gobaud writes "Jason Sobel, the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, gave an interesting presentation titled Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos at Stanford for the Stanford ACM. Jason explains how 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. The presentation is now online here in the form of a Flowgram."

11 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by denzacar · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought it was created just so that you could have all your spam and silly forwards in one place.

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    1. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by snowraver1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I find it funny that you start by defending FaceBook from the following statement:
      I thought it was created just so that you could have all your spam and silly forwards in one place.

      Then proceed to futher prove the GP post by saying:
      The best thing I can compare it to is AOL

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    2. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by hostyle · · Score: 4, Funny

      Me too!

      Not everyone prides themselves on using a 'cool' isp.

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      Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
  2. I dunno. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    But seeing as how this just got posted and already it's Slashdotted, I'll bet it's not the same way Flowgram stores its presentations.

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    My blog
    1. Re:I dunno. by IRGlover · · Score: 5, Funny

      I bet UK productivity rocketed this afternoon then ;-)

    2. Re:I dunno. by owlnation · · Score: 4, Funny

      And nothing of value was lost.

      In other news, companies in the UK reported record productivity this afternoon.

  3. How X Stores Billions of Photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ohhhh boy, queue the pr0n jokes in 3... 2... 1...

  4. he has a premium acct... by OglinTatas · · Score: 4, Funny

    at Flickr

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  5. Slashdotted by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does anyone see the irony in Flowgram's demonstration?

    Flowgram Guy 1: "OK, this is how Facebook stores billions of photos and serves thousands of them each second"
    Flowgram Guy 2: "Cool, maybe we should implement that technology"
    Flowgram Guy 1: "Why? It's not as if we're ever going to have our servers swamped with thousands of requests..."

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    Summation 2
    1. Re:Slashdotted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Get the latest version. I'm a problem solver.

  6. Next paper by apillowofclouds · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next article, how to effectively serve a Flowgram that's referenced on Slashdot