# Large file storage in database

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/large-file-storage-in-database/82614>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 19, 2007, 4:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/large-file-storage-in-database/82614 "2007-01-19T16:31:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/e47774/32.png) [@quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quangn)\
**Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 4:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/large-file-storage-in-database/82614/1 "2007-01-19T16:31:41Z")

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I’m in the planning stage of an app that will store images and short  
video clips approximately 1 meg in size from user uploads. My partner  
wants to use the database to store all of the files, mainly for scaling  
purposes.

I recently built a similar app using the filesystem, but that was to be  
run from a single machine. This new app will have 3 application servers  
and a fileserver for statics. I still think it would be effective to use  
the filesystem to store the files and write them via a NFS share to the  
fileserver, but I am open to using the database. Has anyone done  
anything like this or have any information of the performance of this  
type of setup? I would appreciate any comments.

Jason

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**Author:** ![quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/e47774/32.png) [@quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quangn)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 10:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/large-file-storage-in-database/82614/2 "2007-09-25T22:32:23Z")

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> anything like this or have any information of the performance of this  
> type of setup? I would appreciate any comments.

I think as long as you’re aware of how much space the files will use up  
in  
your database _and_ you cache the results to the filesystem upon first  
retrieval, keeping them in the database isn’t so bad.

I wouldn’t use NFS simply because i hear (and have seen) too many  
instances where it hangs. You also don’t get any reduncancy (although  
you  
don’t with a single db instance either).

What we do (ours is for internal content admin folks, not end users) is  
upload the data, then do an internal post to our ‘media master’. When  
an  
end user hits page that needs that content it talks to one of 4 media  
slaves. The slaves are configured so that if they don’t have it they  
ask  
for it from the master. So within a short time the content has been  
replicated out to four servers and served statically.

-philip

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/e47774/32.png) [@quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quangn)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 10:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/large-file-storage-in-database/82614/3 "2007-09-25T22:39:16Z")

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So, I recently built an engine for our server to deal with images,  
which caches them into the public directory to be served by apache.  
The article Greg put up doesn’t deal too well with the bigger rails  
issues that make serving images from rails really slow…

- Rails is particularly poor at multiplexing lots of connections.
- Rails, by default, loves to dump your database inserts (particularly  
if they fail) to your log.

We used to have images in our database, but that caused some pretty  
massive problems with the log. It also makes it particularly bad  
because you snag your model to do something like ask, how many users  
does this image have, and oops, you just pulled a crapload of data from  
your database, yeowch!  
If you’re serving images off of your db, you’ll also want to make sure  
that you only serve them up if they’re NOT out of date… here’s a  
handy snippet of code to do that:

def only\_if\_modified(date)  
minTime = Time.rfc2822(@request.env[“HTTP\_IF\_MODIFIED\_SINCE”])  
rescue nil

```
    if minTime && date <= minTime
        render_text '', '304 Not Modified'
    else
        yield
    end
end
helper_method :only_if_modified

```

Here’s the solution I pulled off, and why I did it.

- Apache is awesome at serving up images.
- We’ve got pictures which we want to serve up in lots of different  
sizes, like thumbnails.
- I wanted people’s browsers to cache the images without much work.

So, what i did was, I made a caching solution that stores the images  
into a public directory and caches different versions of the image into  
a directory /public/images/cache with unique hashes based upon the  
image and the size. I haven’t done any real performance metrics on  
this, but my observations noted a pretty huge performance gain.

Cheers,  
-Bramski

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/e47774/32.png) [@quangn](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quangn)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 10:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/large-file-storage-in-database/82614/4 "2007-09-25T22:45:21Z")

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On 1/12/07, Jason N. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> fileserver, but I am open to using the database. Has anyone done  
> anything like this or have any information of the performance of this  
> type of setup? I would appreciate any comments.

This was beat to death some time ago:

[http://www.zend.com/zend/trick/tricks-sept-2001.php?article=tricks-sept-2001&kind=tr&id=2033&open=1&anc=0&view=1](http://www.zend.com/zend/trick/tricks-sept-2001.php?article=tricks-sept-2001&kind=tr&id=2033&open=1&anc=0&view=1)

–  
Greg D.  
[http://destiney.com/](http://destiney.com/)