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Neil McGovern - Fotopic.net

30 million and counting: An insight into a enterprise level open source systems

Fotopic.Net was born from the minds of husband and wife team Joel and Nicky Rowbottom, and began life on 2nd August 1999 as Photos.jml.net. As with all good ideas it arose out of a laziness on Joel's part for publishing images from their new digital camera.

As time went on, more and more people asked for either copies of the engine which ran the site, or whether we could run a gallery for them... so eventually they gave in and wrote Fotopic.Net.

The site is the culmination of several years of work, together with an almost fanatical obsession with digital photography.

During its fourth year it expanded the facilities to include multiple image formats, direct publishing from the new generation of mobile phone cameras, a variety of PDF facilities, live thumbnails, fast image processing, and the most configurable photo gallery system to-date.

It also survived the so-called dot-com crash which left many other photo sites without users. Fotopic has grown from strength to strength in the last 6 years and is used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. It now has tens of millions of images in its database.

Technology

Fotopic runs on a cluster of Linux boxes, utilising Perl, PHP, and various other custom-written C binaries. Image and video manipulation is done on-the-fly dependent on connection speed and browser, and users may customise their galleries and collections through use of their interface.

The application server cluster is comprised of around 50 Intel servers, and the core database is powered by a giant RAID system, using MySQL on various boxes.

Fileservers are RAID5, using hotswap SATA drives with warm spare and cold spare. We back up the image archive frequently (for internal use) and store backup drives at a separate location.

The talk will describe how this is all brought together and how Open Source Systems can be deployed on an enterprise scale.