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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."

50 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.

    --
    Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
    1. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by oskard · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you're thinking of MySpace.

      If you used the service, you'd know that Facebook privacy settings are actually implemented very well. For example, I set up an account for my mother so she can look at all her siblings photos. She hasn't been bothered by anyone outside of the family, and is really enjoying the ability to communicate with everyone.

      The best thing I can compare it to is AOL. Its got a built in Email clone, IM service, Forums, Groups, and of course, profiles. But unlike AOL, Facebook is just a web page. There's no lock in - its more of a resource provider than a service provider.

      --
      Sigs are for Terrorists.
    2. 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

      --
      Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
    3. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This stuff is cool either way, even if it is just "childish spam." Many of us only dream to work on something that will become this large scale.

      Facebook started off (stolen idea or not) as a site with some php and a database. In the early years there were no applications or photos. They've managed to scale PHP beyond what most slashdotters will say PHP can even do. They've even contributed some of their stuff back to the PHP community.

      Look at some other similar 'home grown' sites that have had to quickly scale and invent stuff just to stay a float.
      Archive.org has their pentabox
      Google has their Google File System and all of their own hard ware design.

      Hopefully the site will recover. 540TB of data and 500k images per second while at the same time being able to process photos near instantly in the background to 4-5 different sizes is nothing to ignore. Fortune 500 companies could probably learn a thing or two...

    4. 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.

      --
      Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
    5. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by vux984 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you used the service, you'd know that Facebook privacy settings are actually implemented very well.

      Given that I can't look at my sisters photos without signing up for an account I'd say her privacy is being 'protected' solely to induce all her friends and siblings to sacrifice theirs by joining facebook.

      I set up an account for my mother so she can look at all her siblings photos.

      You don't need facebook for that.

      and is really enjoying the ability to communicate with everyone.

      or that.

      But unlike AOL, Facebook is just a web page. There's no lock in - its more of a resource provider than a service provider.

      How exactly is requiring me to create and login to a facebook account to view content someone else wants me to be able to see not lockin?

      That's like requiring me to create a gmail account to receive email from people with gmail accounts. Or requiring me to sign up to AOL to see websites hosted by AOL. Facebook is pretty much the definition of lock-in.

    6. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'd need to test it again, but I'm fairly certain FB had a function that let you share albums with non-users by having FB generate a special link you'd give to the user.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    7. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by STrinity · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's Digg -- "Hey look at this cool link I found."

      Facebook is where you spam your friends with pointless messages about how you've hurled a squirrel at them.

      --
      Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
    8. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by PatrickThomson · · Score: 2, Funny

      I totally agree with you about how having friends on facebook is highly offensive and joining it will lead to identity theft and involuntary permanent incarceration in guantanamo bay. My neighbour tried to give facebook fake details, and mark zuckerberg showed up and stabbed him in the eye.

      --
      I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
    9. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by PatrickThomson · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's nice to have principles but at the end of the day my friends come first. I can always (ad)block adverts. Oh no, what if they wheedle into my subconcious or the ToS change? Then I'll occasionally make a marginally worse purchasing decision. It's not like i never do that anyway.

      --
      I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
    10. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by TimboJones · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I would consider a social networking product if one existed where I was the customer not the product.

      Sure, that's a nice idea. But of course then you're paying for it, and most likely so must all your friends and family if they want to share its best features with you. I think a social network built on that model would not grow large. It might fill a niche, but it would have nowhere near the utility of a free-to-join network that promotes sharing information.

      What makes a social networking site really great can't happen unless there are a lot of people using it. The policies, shininess, and penetration of Facebook allow amazing results in short time frames. I've been on Facebook I think less than a year. I don't visit the site often, yet in that time I have regained contact with friends last seen during high school, played games with coworkers, learned about worthwhile charitable causes, hosted memes, and grown closer to people after learning about mutual interests that might not have come to light during normal conversation.

      Consider an acquaintance of mine, a person I met several years ago. We've previously exchanged pleasantries and gotten along well at the odd party or the around the neighborhood where I work, but never held a conversation about any Deep Topics or connected much more broadly than Shared Entertainment Experiences and Goofy Jokes. About two weeks ago our Facebook networks connected. Tonight I received an invitation to a philosophical roundtable discussion at a library across town. The topic promises to present new ideas and address questions and gaps in my web of understanding. A doorway opens to become better friends with good people. What a serendipitous opportunity! Maybe I would have heard about this event through another medium in a Facebookless world. I doubt it. I don't check the library's events calendar.

      I know that Facebook consumes as much information about me as they can stuff into their considerable data hole. So I make sure to only provide information that I don't mind sharing to all and sundry. I don't accept friend requests from people I don't know in meat space. I hesitate to register with apps because I know they get access to everything. I wish Facebook would uncheck their permission boxes by default. But every such border is a barrier to information flow, and networks like Facebook thrive and grow, both in size and utility, on the free flow of information.

      Free is the key. Every reward is born from risk.

    11. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by vux984 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sure, that's a nice idea. But of course then you're paying for it, and most likely so must all your friends and family if they want to share its best features with you.

      Lets see, my ISP offers 'free' email, pop3, imap, and webmail access. They offer 'free' access to a reasonable number of usenet groups, and offer a small and fairly limited but entirely usable web hosting package, with tools to make it easy to setup multiple small websites, upload and share photos, and so on.

      Is it really 'free'? Of course not, its bundled in with my internet access so I'm paying for it. And while I have no gaurantee that my ISP isn't reading my email, and processing my hosted content, that isn't their business model, and they aren't pasting adds up in my site or in my email.

      I think a social network built on that model would not grow large. It might fill a niche, but it would have nowhere near the utility of a free-to-join network that promotes sharing information.

      You mean the model email and usenet and the web itself were built on couldn't reach the critical mass of users to be really interesting and useful? Give me a break.

      What makes a social networking site really great can't happen unless there are a lot of people using it.

      Sounds a lot like email, and that's worked out just fine.

      Lots of people using it. In fact, I can send messages to people at work, coordinate meetings, organize outings, exchange messages with friends, even grandparents. Some of them use ad-supported hosted services, some of them use paid services, some of them host their own services, all seamlessly interconnecting.

      Consider an acquaintance of mine, a person I met several years ago...

      I'm not arguing -against- social netorking. I'm arguing against accepting facebook lock-in, becoming a product, and selling your information in exchange for a features.

      Its a fallacy that the only way we can have services like social networking or instant messaging is via accepting ridiculous lock-in, and closed standards.

      Next thing you'll be telling me there is no way to create a modern fully featured multi-user operating system and application suites that could be downloaded and used for free without either paying exorbitant prices for licensing or signing all your rights to the data on your PC away.

      Oh wait... ;p

    12. Re:Photos? You mean people use FB for photos too? by vux984 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I haven't used my ISP's mail since I lived on campus back in college. Before I got there, I did not use my dialup ISP's email service. Two reasons: a) email address lock-in; b) the interface sucks.

      re: a - the same applies gmail or any other provider.
      re: b - there was likely no 'gmail' when you were 'back in college on your dialup isp', and most people used standalone clients, many still have little need for webmail.

      Nowadays I've solved the lock-in problem by paying for a domain

      makes sense.

      and the sucky interface problem by having my MX records send all mail to a gmail account, The free-to-join, invasive, ad-supported gmail service works way better than any webmail, IMAP, or POP3 client I've found.

      To each their own.

      Personally I run a Linux server, with Scalix community edition, works great with my smart phone (push email support, address book sync, etc), has an excellent webmail client for the odd time I need one, and I mostly access my mail via Thunderbird. It works way better than any other solution I've found has no privacy implications, is ad free, and it meets my needs and principles better than anything else, including gmail.

      The cool thing about it though is that I can still send you a message without signing up for a gmail account. YOU can agree to their terms, and I can stand by mine, and we can still interact, exchange messages,

      Lock-in? Hardly. I'm also on MySpace. I also use email. I also use IM -- Pidgin, so I don't get locked in to a specific IM service. I also use usenet, web forums, feedback forms, web chat, on and on. Different tools for different tasks. Facebook excels at the task of clustering my friends and exposing information about them.

      You don't know what lock in is then.

      I don't have or want a facebook account. If all your friends had accounts at different social networking sites, how well would facebook excel at 'clustering your friends and exposing information about them'?

      It wouldn't.

      The only way facebook excels if everyone has a facebook account and agrees to facebooks terms of service.
      The only way email excels is if everyone has an email account. The difference is that we can get an email account on any service we like, or even host our own, and it makes no nevermind. No matter where I get my email account you can send it messages.

      While my refusal to submit to facebook means that I am excluded from that entirely because it won't interoperate with any other site. I know people with multiple accounts on multiple social networking sites, not because they have any desire to do so, but because each site gives them access to different groups of friends they can't access from the other site. THAT is the effect of LOCK-IN. I only need one email account to send to any other email provider. I might have multiple if I have a desire for multiple, but I don't need multiple.

      My information costs me nothing to give away. My money costs me money to give away. I'd rather pay for services using a currency that copies on write than one with a 1:1 opportunity cost. Not that I share everything, obviously. Some information will cost to give away - my SSN for example. But most everything about me - my relationship status, my mood, my hobbies - I gain value by giving this information freely.

      That's fine. To each their own. I however have little interest in submitting to facebooks terms of service. I publish what I want people to see on my websites. I'd be happy to integrate with facebook to the extent of letting people include me, message me, etc from their facebook account. But I don't want an account with facebook myself. But facebook is a closed system.

      IM is a service that started with ridiculous lock-in and closed standards. I still used it then. Eventually a service will arise to tie together your Facebook and Myspace networks just like Trillian or Pidgin did for IM.

      Trillian or Pidgin just lets you access your multiple accounts from a single applic

  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.

    --
    My blog
    1. Re:I dunno. by OverlordQ · · Score: 2, Informative

      To view the slideshow . . err I mean 'flowgram' (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean), you dont need to register.

      --
      Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
    2. Re:I dunno. by aproposofwhat · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not only that, but the UK Facebook site has been down most of the afternoon - some infrastructure, huh?

      --
      One swallow does not a fellatrix make
    3. Re:I dunno. by IRGlover · · Score: 5, Funny

      I bet UK productivity rocketed this afternoon then ;-)

    4. 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.

    5. Re:I dunno. by 7+digits · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the late 90's we stopped using documents with images and text), because they had the following disadvantage:

      1) Printable
      2) Searchable
      3) You could look over them at a glance to find information

      We replaced them by the fabulous presentation with voice-over.

      It removed part of the ability to scan over information, to search, and to print.

      Unfortunately, it still had the disage of letting the user seek to some part of the presentation, so another iteration was needed.

      Now, welcome to the 21th century. Thanks to flowgram, you don't have to worry about printing anymore (you can't), or searching (you can't), or even pausing, going forward, or doing anything (you can't).

      If you get a phone call in the middle of the presentation, though luck. And of course, you have no way of knowing how long it is, how long is left, or anything. And if you miss a word or a sentence, you can always restart the presentation and listen more carefully the next time.

      I must congratulate the folks over flowgram.com. It seems very hard to have some idea that could be less usable. I'm pretty sure there is someone somewhere working hard at this, and some VC will give him money for that, but, for now, if you want to put have a shitty unusbale presentation online, flowgram is the way to go.

  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

    --
    More music, fewer hits
  5. FLASH?! by T-Bone-T · · Score: 3, Funny

    "You either have javascript turned off or you have an older version of Adobe Flash."

    That was an informative article but I didn't see anything about Facebook. At least there weren't ads and they kept it to one page!

    1. Re:FLASH?! by Mathiasdm · · Score: 2, Informative

      I do have Javascript installed, and am running Adobe Flash (Linux version). Doesn't work :(

      --
      Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
    2. Re:FLASH?! by nahdude812 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Worked for me from Ubuntu.

      --
      Slay a dragon... over lunch!
    3. Re:FLASH?! by Murpster · · Score: 2, Funny

      Bwaaahh! You damn kids and your newfangled Flash! All I need is Lynx. Now get offa my lawn!

    4. Re:FLASH?! by Firehed · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think it's becoming part of the HTML5 spec; however, it's tremendously more complicated due to the limitless plethora of video formats. With web-oriented images, it's almost all jpegs for photos and typically pngs for graphics, with plenty of gifs around. Tiff is a very established format but never sees use in websites since the files are stupidly large, and most other formats are specific to some editing program. With video, you've got half a dozen Quicktime formats, DivX, XviD, h.264, x264, WMV, Real, and a huge number of others (many of which are pro-oriented). Never mind the play/pause/scrubbing interface (which could become yet another CSS nightmare), the much bigger file size, the audio, auto-playing, etc.

      Until there's a jpeg for video, I'd say we should leave it alone. Flash is currently fulfilling that role, and all things considered does it reasonably well given the ease of implementation.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  6. Ahh haha by Bored+MPA · · Score: 2, Informative

    Perhaps I should turn on audio, or they should have a less friggin confusing UI.

  7. Very interesting by phase_9 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fascinating Presentation for those of you who actually bother to watch the Hour or so of content.

  8. 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..."

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

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

  9. The peak is a paltry 0.45e6/s? by vigmeister · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let's all go look at pictures on fb from 12 noon EST to 12:05 EST. That ought to show them...

    I 3 Myspace hunni!

    Cheers!

    --
    Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
  10. Transcript? by dstar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't suppose there's a transcript of this anywhere, is there? That + slides would be infinitely more useful....

  11. Full sized images, please by bucky0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wish that facebook wouldn't resize its images on the backend. My friends all post pictures from parties/trips, etc.. there, and I'd love to be able to just download the full res version to send off to be printed, but facebook resizes the largest dimension to be ~600px, which is pretty worthless for printing.

    Yeah yeaj. there's other sites that don't, and I post my stuff there (to flickr, personally), but convincing that one person who took the nice photo of you to do it too is near impossible.

    --

    -Bucky
    1. Re:Full sized images, please by Kimos · · Score: 2, Informative

      Get the Big Photo application.

      It's not ideal, but it works quite well. A friend of mine is a professional photographer and she puts all her work up there. Works well for her.

  12. 540TB / 30 billion images by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 3, Informative
    equals about 18k per image?

    RS

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    1. Re:540TB / 30 billion images by JuanCarlosII · · Score: 5, Informative

      A quick survey of the most recent images on my profile tells me a full size image comes in at 50-60k and a standard thumbnail at ~5k so given the other sizes of thumbnail as well I'd say 18k per image is about right.

  13. Looks like beta.flowgram.com should be by sdsurfgeek · · Score: 2, Funny

    alpha.flowgram.com

  14. Not hard by mlwmohawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While the article is slashdotted, this is not a hard problem. It has an expense involved, but it is not difficult.

    So, as another poster implied, 18K per photo on average, so about 8Gig per second, peak.

    So, assuming that the pictures are evenly distributed, you'd need a bunch of machines and a good number of "tubes" and a way of directing requests to the correct image server or server cluster.

    So, what's the problem? Why would you think this is difficult? It's all off the shelf technology, just a bunch of it.

    1. Re:Not hard by funbobby · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The issue isn't the number of bytes per second, it's the number of distinct requests. The data is _way_ bigger than will fit in memory, and hard disks can only do 100-150 seeks per second so you need a lot of them to serve from disk. A naive implementation will go to disk many times for a single file, because filesystems aren't designed for this many small files. So this is really an issue of getting exactly the right stuff in memory so you can serve hot content from memory, and if you go to disk you seek exactly once instead of several times.

  15. Akamai? by ruiner13 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why don't they just use a 3rd party distributed storage system like Akamai NetStorage? Then they don't have to worry about adding capacity, redundancy, etc. All they have to do is upload the picture there, and Akamai mirrors it all around the world.

    --

    today is spelling optional day.

    1. Re:Akamai? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      ...you still have to do that part of uploading to Akamai. And if Akamai brings on a new node, it has to refresh most of the content from you anyway (yeh, its a tiered caching network that usually uploads from other nodes, but sometimes it doesnt). Cache hits from them tend to be in the 97%+ range if done right, but still, 97% of 8Gbs+ leaves 240Mb+ you have to serve. Akamai is a cache, not a content store. What you suggest is akin to saying its ok to pull the Raid array once things are loaded to RAM, cause the OS just keeps the data there. You still have to keep the storage, with redundancy and backups and the bandwidth to serve cache refreshes to Akamai. It does greatly reduce the problem, but it is not a complete solution in itself. It also does not work for most dynamic content, since it doesnt store your DB for you, those requests still have to go home, thus you still have to have the storage, capacity, DB horsepower, etc to serve the requests, including the ones that actually point the requester at Akamai for the static bits.

      I dont work for FB, but a company that does make use of 3rd party caching networks for very large content distributions

      Tm

    2. Re:Akamai? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      That won't work considering the number of files. Given the quote (which require nearly a year of hassle with the Akamai morons and sighing an NDA, thus the AC post) we got from those idiots, it would cost us almost $200k/year given our bandwidth use to store ~1,000 files. Facebook has 30 billion files and assuming the same price per file as we were quoted, Akamai would charge $6,000,000,000,000/year to host them. To put that number in perspective, that's more than the GDP of the Germany plus that of the UK. The Akamai VP (something Danzig, I remember the name because of the band of the same name) I talked to just wasn't able to comprehend why we wouldn't consider paying that much to host a few files. We ended-up renting five 1U servers in four different countries for about $15k/year. While we have a little less total bandwidth and it requires more management time to maintain, it's only 7.5% of the cost of Akamai and we can store many(1,000 times?) more files than Akamai would let us at that price point. To say that the Akamai guys don't understand math is an understatement.

  16. Facebook needs to add more processing capacity by debest · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I put some short video clips on Facebook's video application (just stuff of my daughter for my friends and family to see). These are AVI files generated by my digital camera, about 20-30MB in size, lasting about 1-1.5 minutes each.

    They uploaded pretty quickly, but then they were put in a queue to be encoded for their flash player. It took over 3 days for them to be online in my profile! It seems they don't need to just have large capacity for storage, but a bunch more CPU for processing.

    --
    Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
  17. Next paper by apillowofclouds · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  18. Already been done. by sirrube · · Score: 5, Informative

    This stuff is cool either way, even if it is just "childish spam." Many of us only dream to work on something that will become this large scale.

    ...

    Fortune 500 companies could probably learn a thing or two...

    This Fortune 500 company could teach a thing or two on this subject. Since before 1999 DataTree has already did this. With over 40 billion land records online, and 600+TB of data, they deliver many millions of images daily. Not to put down FaceBook's Implementation, but DataTree does not need to run 10k webservers and 1800 SQL databases to provide images. It is nice to see the scalability factor of their design, but it does not mean that it is the most efficient way to do things, or to follow and learn from.
  19. I find by msimm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That if you plan to do it (or hope to) it helps to read the ups and down of people who already have. And it's *nice* that some take the time out (as ./ did and a number of other sites) to talk about it so that we can learn from their experience and mistakes.

    But if you already know everything, by all means, shoot. But the outline that just got you modded as insightful isn't an application, didn't detail redundancy of any sort and would be a management nightmare (ie, all the interesting stuff).

    I mean really, we could propose that solution to just about any web based application but that's not hardly the story is it?

    --
    Quack, quack.
  20. When you are talking 500Tb, you hit limits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Limits, like: Netap filers max out at 16Tb (raw) per volume, so you have to start using multiple volumes and get creative with mount points and hope you dont hit some other limit (max files/inodes, addressing limits of the os/fs, etc). The harder part is the "way of directing requests to the correct image server/cluster" you mention. Its not quite "off the shelf" technology, as you now have to implement something that can handle the 4750000+ requests per second and point them in the right direction for a single entry in a pool of 30000000000. And thats just images, you still have to route and serve the rest of the content for the pages. At those levels, a simple F5 load balancer is not going to cut it. Stacking a bunch of F5's still wont do. This will probably be distributed across several DCs stretched across distant geographical areas with some DNS magic to route traffic to locally close DCs. Keeping even the indexes in sync so the requests can be rerouted to the proper DC (if not stored locally) becomes an interesting problem to solve.

    No, I dont work for them, but I do work for another company facing similar storage/distribution problems. When things get this big, its not simply "take what works and just make it bigger or get more of them", you have to start redesigning things. For a bad car analogy: its like saying a passenger train is just a bunch of greyhound busses.

    tm

  21. server load fixed by gobaudd · · Score: 2, Informative

    we had some problems in the beginning but the server should be much better now.

  22. How Facebook Stores Billions of Photos? by electricbern · · Score: 3, Funny

    Simple: 70 thousand pen drives.

    --
    alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls /dev > il && tail daemon.log'
  23. User-mode GoogleFS by Panaflex · · Score: 4, Informative

    (summarizing the big long presentation)

    This is basically want to make a usermode GoogleFS. Their biggest problem is reducing reads - which are hampered by Posix file standards (inodes, metadata, etc...)

    Instead they use a database-like index/data file arrangement. The index stays in memory and files are stored together in large contiguous spaces on a single file. It's possible to utilize a LUN for storage - but not there yet.

    There... where's my cookie?

    (Oddly enough - I'm writing the exact same code they are... bazaar world, eh??)

    --
    I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.