how to...accelarate randon access to millions of images?

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Sascha Ottolski <ottolski at web.de> writes:
> Now my question is: what kind of hardware would I need? Lots of RAM 
> seems to be obvious, what ever "a lot" may be...What about the disk 
> subsystem? Should I look into something like RAID-0 with many disk to 
> push the IO-performance?

First things first: instead of a few large disks, you want lots of small
fast ones - 36 GB or 72 GB 10,000 RPM disks - to maximize bandwidth.

There are two ways you might condfigure your storage: one is to place
all the disks in a RAID-0 array and use a single file system and storage
file on top of that.  The alternative is to have a separate file system
and storage file on each disk.  I honestly don't know which will be the
fastest; if you have a chance to run some benchmarks, I'd love to see
your numbers and your conclusion.

Note that even if a single RAID-0 array turns out to be the fastest
option, you may have to compromise and split your disks into two arrays,
unless you find a RAID controller that can handle the number of disks
you need.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav
Senior Software Developer
Linpro AS - www.linpro.no