Forum Moderators: phranque
Can any one recommend a good schema or place to learn about doing so for image storage so that my site isn't overloading directories with large numbers of files? Thanks.
Q2. What filesystem is in use on your server? Some (e.g. Reiser4) cope particularly well with VERY large numbers of relatively small files in the same directory. I've got mailservers with many tens of thousands of files in one directory and my servers run smoothly with Reiser4 partitions. With ext3 it would be unbearable.
Why not simply store the images with either a random string, or a sequential number, put the filename in your backend database? The end users shouldn't need to see the storage schema - so storing images 01 to 00999 in the directory 00001, then move to directory 02 for images 01000 to 01999, and so on. Until you get to directory 99 you'll be fine... :-)
Structure things to enable lots of growth - and if you end up running out of space you can always map extra storage in using NFS if you've segmented things by directory.
Does that help?
I have great luck having images stored in the DB without creating files on the drive, but I wouldn't always recommend it depending on size, quantity, etc.
You can have a sep. photos table that relates to the users table and allow multiple records in photos for each user.
Then when a user is disabled or needs to be deleted - it's very easy to have all associated pics deleted at same time.
Again, it'd be nice to know more about the specs you plan to see from this.
My question is really how to organize the directories to allow the most efficient storage within the file system. I know large sites like photobucket us some sort of algorythm to organize and store the system (as evidenced by the directory and file names) and I wanted to learn more about setting up something like that.
