On Jan 8, 2004, at 14:10, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:
I'm still wondering how the images are stored currently- on the hd of a single Server? They don't seem to be in the database.
There is a table in the database that _lists_ images, but the uploaded files are simply stored in the web server's local filesystem. For the primitive en/en2 split, we just force all image-related actions to happen on one server, but that's not very satisfactory.
Probably Brion has more good ideas about how to handle images on our proposed architecture.
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.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)