Lighttpd turned out to be poor for serving the thumbnails, because its main loop is a bottleneck to load files from disk; they addressed this by modifying Lighttpd to add worker threads to read from disk. This was good but still not good enough, with one thumbnail per file, because the enormous number of files was terribly slow to work with (imagine tarring up many million files).

Their new solution for thumbnails is to use Google’s BigTable, which provides high performance for a large number of rows, fault tolerance, caching, etc. This is a nice (and rare?) example of actual synergy in an acquisition.

memcached, lighthttpd, python, the usual mysql problems, sharding etc