How Facebook Stores Billions of Photos

June 27th, 2008

By Justin Smith

One thing not everyone knows about Facebook is they’re also the biggest photo storage and sharing site on the web. To date, Facebook users have uploaded over 6.5 billion images. Facebook stores them in 5 sizes each, totaling over 30 billion files that take up about 540 TB of disk space.

Recently, Jason Sobel, Facebook’s manager of infrastructure engineering, gave a presentation at the Stanford ACM entitled Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos. He talks about the infrastructure Facebook has built to handle this volume of data and serve it at high performance (Facebook serves almost half a million images per/second at peak load). You can check out the presentation here.

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5 Responses to “How Facebook Stores Billions of Photos”

Mauro Says:
June 27th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Is there a large or original version of the photo?
Justin Smith Says:
June 28th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Mauro, I don’t think Facebook makes a large/original version available…
Como agrandar fotos en Facebook | CEROYOUNO Says:
June 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
[...] un post sobre cómo se las arreglan en Facebook para almacenar más de 6.5 mil millones de imágenes (540 [...]
10-15% of Facebook Photos Temporarily Missing, Now Recovered Says:
March 10th, 2009 at 12:45 am
[...] 10-15% may not seem like a lot, remember that Facebook crossed 10 billion user photos stored late last year and is the most popular photo sharing service on the web. Facebook says users are [...]
Jarquel Says:
January 2nd, 2010 at 4:56 am
No. 6.5 billion images in original size from 10mpix is imposible..