Oct20

Flickr architecture

Cal Henderson of Ludicorp gave a presentation to the Vancouver PHP Association on September 9 about Flickr's general architecture and the use of PHP. A zip of the PowerPoint presentation is available on Flickr's site. I converted the PowerPoint presentation to a PDF file for easy viewing. (via MovableBlog Asides) Some interesting statistics on Flickr as of September 2004:
  • About 60,000 lines of PHP code.
  • About 60,000 lines of templates.
  • About 25,000 database transactions per second at peak.
  • 13 selects per insert/update/delete.
  • About 1,000 pages per second at peak.
  • They use Java for their node service and as a FTP daemon.

4 Comments

Commentary on "Flickr architecture":

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  1. Casey Marshall on June 1, 2005 at 9:54 AM wrote: #

    Thank you for posting a very insightful look into the design behind a site I really admire (wish I could have been at that presentation!). I am a little confused by some of the slides (perhaps b/c they are out of context). In what way is "InnoDB faster" (on the "FULLTEXT Indexes" slide)? Is it much faster for selects? Surely for I/U/D operations, InnoDB would be slower, since it has the overhead of transactions, right?

  2. dragonliquid on April 20, 2006 at 1:41 AM wrote: #

    MySQL? as far as I know till MySQL 5.1 InnoDB doesn't support FULLTEXT indexing

  3. Janak Prajapati on February 8, 2007 at 4:24 AM wrote: #

    Very useful contents..spcially the flickr architecture...but in pdf there is no explaination about the topic..can u post this pdf in details?.. thanks for posting such entry.

  4. Naren on May 21, 2007 at 7:16 AM wrote: #

    very insightful. i was looking for more information clustering and scaling servers.

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Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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