Fotolog, Inc.

Delivering Quality Service to 21 Million Users with Sun Fire T1000 Servers and Solaris 10

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 than 21 million member accounts from over 100 countries have shared more than 300 million photos since its inception in 2002. Fotolog provides a platform for members to share experiences and connect with others across the globe by bringing together the power of digital photography, social networking, and blogging to attract and entertain in a unique and captive user experience.

Customer Challenges

Scale to support 21 million members and 100 million page views a day
Increase performance without increasing IT investment
Achieve 24x7 availability to keep word-of-mouth advertising working

Solution

MySQL Enterprise and InnoDB transactional storage engine for MySQL running on The Solaris 10 Operating System and CoolThreads server technology.

Business Results

Support for three times as many users with no additional hardware
Four times the number of concurrent threads without adding servers
Anticipated ability to double current number of threads

Products and Services

Story Details

Fotolog has experienced 100 percent growth year-over-year in the 5 years since its inception. It is expecting the same rate of growth this year. Results like these put pressure on the IT department to keep technology working with a smooth migration path to continuous improvement.

As the 18th most trafficked site on the Internet and growing, Fotolog must reliably scale up to process increasingly large transaction volumes--without requiring a cost-prohibitive investment in additional server hardware. The company is meeting this challenge by running MySQL Enterprise and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL on The Solaris 10 Operating System.

" Sun's servers and the Solaris 10 Operating System have been crucial to Fotolog's growth in the performance, availability and reliability of our Web site. In addition, we've been able to keep our costs down enabling us to scale at a very reasonable expense. In a business like ours, keeping costs low is everything. "

— Warren Habib, CTO, Fotolog

The combination of MySQL Enterprise, InnoDB and Solaris 10 enables Fotolog to efficiently process ever-larger numbers of transactions by simply increasing the number of concurrent threads--the number of transactions that can be run at one time--without adding 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.

Fotolog also scaled by porting the PHP application for its Web site to Java using Apache and Tomcat running on Solaris 10 Operating System and CoolThreads server technology. The port enabled Fotolog to decrease the number of servers supporting the Web site. Fotolog's experience initially with its Sun Fire V210 servers and now with its Sun Fire T1000 servers has allowed the company to keep up with its growth without missing a beat. As the site has been growing, Warren Habib, CTO, has been tweaking up the pressure on the new Sun Fire T1000 servers. "I'm actually seeing that the more pressure I put on the T1000s, the better they handle it," says Habib.

These days, energy efficiency is a prerequisite to growth. Power is not an unlimited resource. "There's just a limit on how much more power we can get," says Habib. "For instance, I could run 16 boxes on 40 amps in the past. With the newer boxes I can go up to 24 boxes or more on that same power. So I've increased my efficiency in terms of rack space and kept my power cost down even as power is getting more expensive. I've actually increased my performance because I'm able to provide more bang for the amp."