Geek read: What happens when you upload a Facebook photo?
Ever wonder what happens when you upload a mobile photo from your iPhone or BlackBerry to Facebook? The storage wonks at Facebook are about to tell you.
In a fascinating geeked out read, Facebook's Peter Vajgel walks us through the storage system behind the social networking site's photo application, which is massive.
A few stats:
- Users have uploaded 15 billion photos;
- Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes (think 60 billion images and 1.5 petabytes of storage;
- There are 25 terabytes of new storage consumed weekly as 220 million photos are added each week;
- And there are 550,000 images served a second.
The notes on Facebook's storage systems mostly revolve around the company's recent infrastructure swap . I'm not going to pretend to understand all of Facebook's storage mumbo jumbo, but there are a few key points.
Facebook's storage system is built on commodity storage blades with this configuration: 2 x quad-core CPUs; 16GB – 32GB memory; hardware raid controller with 256MB – 512MB of NVRAM cache; and 12+ 1TB SATA drives. Add it up and you get roughly 10TB per blade. That's enough to store your life on, but only gets Facebook through a few days.
If you were to draw it up Facebook's Haystack storage system looks like this:
There's a lot more from Facebook for those interested. All the average bear needs to know is that there's a lot of storage blocking and tackling going on every time you upload some silly picture from the pub.