Fotolog

Delivering quality service to eleven million users with MySQL, InnoDB,

Customer Success Story
and the Solaris 10 Operating System
TM

Highlights

Challenges
• Scale to support eleven million members
and more than 100 million page views a day
• Increase performance without increase
in database hardware

Solution
• MySQL database software
• InnoDB transactional storage engine
for MySQL
• Solaris™ 10 Operating System
• Sun V440 and V210

Results
• Support for four times as many users
with no additional hardware
• Higher percentage of working dataset As the 18th most trafficked site on the Internet and growing,
in the memory with efficient schemas Fotolog needs to be able to reliably scale up to processing
• Four times the number of concurrent
increasingly large transaction volumes – without requiring
threads without adding servers
• Anticipated ability to double current a cost-prohibitive investment in additional server hardware.
number of threads The company is meeting this challenge by running MySQL
database software and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL
on the Solaris 10 Operating System.

The combination of MySQL, InnoDB, and The advantages of Solaris 10 as

Solaris 10 enables Fotolog to efficiently process
ever-larger numbers of transactions by simply
optimizing schema for data access patterns
and increasing the number of concurrent
threads—or the number of transactions that
can be run at one time—without increasing
the number of servers. So far, the company has
scaled from 8 to 32 and then to 64 threads, and
it expects to increase that number to 96 next.
Fotolog scaled specifically by increasing
thread concurrency in MySQL under Solaris 10,
using InnoDB efficiently, and porting its PHP
application to Java™. The Java port allowed
Fotolog to actually decrease the number of
speakers serving the site.
a platform for scalability
Fotolog could have chosen to build the data
storage and processing architecture for its
Web site on Linux; it is, after all, an open
platform that supports a wide variety of
hardware and applications, just as Solaris 10
does. The difference for Fotolog was in their
ability to support multiple concurrent
threads. Apparently, the higher the number
of concurrent threads running, the higher the
risk of failure and thread thrashing with Linux.
And because Fotolog had decided to pursue
a concurrent-thread strategy for scaling the
solution, the company elected to go with
Solaris 10, which it believed to be a more
thread-friendly solution—and therefore more

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Fotolog
likely to deliver the scalable performance
necessary to reliably deliver website content
to its members quickly and efficiently.
Choosing the right storage engine—
and tuning it for scalability
Of the data storage engines available for
use with MySQL, InnoDB is the one that is
known for allowing multiple pieces of data
to be inserted into the database at one time.
However, Fotolog found that concurrent
threading alone was not enough to guard
against processing slowdowns and poor service
at peak times. To do that, the storage engine
would have to be tuned to allow it to run more
than eight concurrent threads. In addition,
the schema will need to be optimized to take
advantage of the storage engine offerings.
Once that was accomplished, Fotolog elected
to increase the number of threads running
concurrently to 32, and then, shortly
thereafter, to 64.
“At 64 threads, our members
see their Fotolog pages. At 32,
they wait.”
Farhan Mashraqi
Fotolog
Further optimizing the architecture
to support 64 threads
Before Fotolog, no known company had ever
expanded to 64 concurrent InnoDB threads on
a single instance of MySQL. The traditional
scalability solution has always been to
scale-out by adding more servers, rather than
increasing thread concurrency. To make sure
that this first configuration of its kind would
Sun Microsystems, Inc. 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA Phone 1-650-960-1300 or 1-800-555-9SUN Web sun.com
© 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, and Java are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
Information subject to change without notice. Printed in USA.
07-727_Sun_Fotolog-3.indd 2
sun.com/solaris
continue to support peak performance at peak than eleven million member accounts from
times, Fotolog further tuned the solution by more than 200 countries have shared more
taking advantage of the “clustered index” than 300 million photos since its inception
feature on InnoDB. This feature changes the in 2002. Fotolog provides a platform for
way the system responds to requests for data members to share experiences and connect
needed to create Fotolog pages, making it with others across the globe by bringing
possible to perform to call up a page and all together the power of digital photography,
the guestbook comments associated with it social networking, and blogging to attract
using the minimal amount of disk seeks— and entertain in a unique and captive
instead of having to perform a separate disk user experience.
seek for every single comment. This eliminates
a significant potential for disk-based Fotolog recently agreed to be acquired by
bottlenecks and slowdowns, dramatically Hi Media, a French publicly traded company.
increasing performance.
A unique hybrid of photo sharing, social net-
“Because we can complete a job as one working, and blogging, Fotolog is the choice
request instead of up to 200 separate ones, of millions of users worldwide to connect with
everything can go much faster,” explains friends and favorites through photos.
Mashraqi. “Whenever the disk needs to write,
it will be available to do it.” For more information
To learn more about the Solaris 10 operating
On the horizon system, visit sun.com/solaris. For additional
Having seen exponentially beneficial results information about Fotolog, visit fotolog.com
of running 64 concurrent threads, Fotolog
is now looking at doubling the number of
threads to 96. The company believes, based on
its experience thus far, that its current number
of servers—32—will be able to continue to
handle the load. “Some people solve the
scaling problem by throwing hardware at it,
which is not a good business outcome,
especially if they don’t understand their
bottlenecks,” says Mashraqi. “We do it by
pushing Solaris to its limits.”
About Fotolog
Fotolog, Inc. is the world’s largest photo-
blogging community, the 18th most
trafficked site on the Internet, and the 3rd 
most trafficked social networking site. More
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