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How did MySQL help here? It uses the filesystem too... I can imagine that you want to hold these images in RAM to bypass the filesystem. Maybe MySQl did that f

• pmelendez 10y ago
  If you have a great amount of tiny images then you are relying in how fast is the filesystem to localize the image. Chances are that depending on the index you are using MySQL could do a better job (this depends on the storage engine but usually is one file for the table and another ones for indexes)
• PeterisP 10y ago
  "bypassing the filesystem" in this case means not having a million of tiny files, which often hurts performance. If you'd have non-DB system for that (e.g. any game with a lot of tiny images), then you would generally want to use spritesheets, archives or some other approach to store many of these images in a single file instead of having each of them be a separate entry in the filesystem.
• teraflop 10y ago
  Typically, filesystems are designed and tuned around the assumption that most of your data is stored in relatively large files. For instance, a typical ext4 filesystem uses 256 bytes per inode and rounds each data block up to a multiple of 4096 bytes. So if you want to store lots and lots of tiny objects, it's very inefficient to store them each in a separate file. At that point, you could design your own compound data format, making sure it efficiently supports all the different operations you might want to do... or you could just use a database which has already solved the problem for you.