submitted by nael on Friday, April 4 2008 at 5:24 PM
As I'm sure you all noticed that the site was down today. This was cause by server failure. As a result, we have spent the day setting up a new server. Unfortunately, the most recent backup of the database occurred on April 1st, so some posts will be missing.
We also haven't been able to transfer the pictures yet, due to the sheer size of the folder (31 gigabytes of pictures).
Assuming an average image file size of 30 kilobytes, 31 gigabytes is enough for 1,000,000 individual images.
There are currently 30,715 registered users. The grand majority of them are limited to 50 images in their photo galleries. If all 30,715 users filled their galleries with 50 unique 30-KB images each, the files would only occupy about 44 GB in raw data. Depending on the file system, call it 50 GB on disk.
But most users have fewer than 50 images in their galleries, and CrazyWeb has a neat optimization where each image uploaded is checked against the existing image database. If a user copies an image from another user's gallery or attempts to upload an image that already exists, CrazyWeb populates his gallery with a link to the pre-existing image. So if one user uploads one 30-KB image and the other 30,714 users upload the same image or copy it from the originator's gallery, CrazyWeb saves itself nearly 900 MB in file space by merely linking the record for the image.
I'm surprised the images take up 31 GB. I thought it'd be less.
[Edited on April 4, 2008 at 9:17 PM. Reason : lll]
31GB of images does not take this long to transfer... Unless the HDD died and you did not have backups of the images.
And are there thumbnails, or are the gallery pages (that mainly do work) loading the full images? Just see major speed decrease, even with galleries smaller than 50 images.