Store user profile pictures on disk or in the database?

Question

I\'m building an asp.net mvc application where users can attach a picture to their profile, but also in other areas of the system like a messaging gadget on the dashboard that d

Answer 1

Store references to the files on a database and store the files themselves on disk.

This approach is way more flexible and easier to scale.

You can have a single database and several servers serving static content. It will be much trickier to have several databases doing that work.

Flickr works this way.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

Actually your datastore look up with the database may actually be faster depending on the number of images you have, unless you are using highly optimized filesystem engine. Databases are designed for fast lookups and use a LOT more interesting techniques than a file system does.

reiserfs (obsolete) really awesome for lookups, zfs, xfs and NTFS all have fantastic hashing algorithms, linux ext4 looks promising too.

The hit on the system is not going to be any different in terms of block reads. The question is what is faster a query lookup that returns the filename (may be a hash?) which in turn is accessed using a separate open, filesend close? or just dumping the blob out?

There are several things to consider, including network hit, processing hit, distributability etc. If you store stuff in the database, then you can move it. Then again, if you store images on a content delivery service that may be WAY faster since you are not doing any network hits on yrouself.

Think about it, and remember bit of benchmarking never hurt nobody :-) so test it out with your typical dataset size and take into account things like simultaneous queries etc.