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 File Transfer Protocol (FTP) daemon.