On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 12:25:05AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Jan 8, 2004, at 14:10, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:
Well, the idea I floated a while ago, which was somewhat unpopular, was to basically keep the "real" images as blobs in the database and let the web servers cache them to the local filesystem as needed.
I should point out that the database holds far more data in the revision history than we have in uploaded images. en.wikipedia.org's uploads directory totals about 1.2GB, de's is <300MB. If we're talking about saving 14GB from the database by compressing old revisions, 2 gigs or so of images seem a relatively minor burden.
Unpopular it was due to the already high load of the apaches and databases. If the images are cached by the squids, it shouldn't be a big difference whether they are stored in the DB or in the filesystem from a performance point of view.
Putting them into the DB would save a lot of work: no need to have redundant file servers.
Regards,
JeLuF