How to build an image web server?

Question

I am trying to build an web image server. It serves images to lots of clients(10 thousands+) simultaneously. (It will be a easier problem if there is fewer clients.) What is a g

Answer 1

If you want to design the fastest static file webserver with lowest latency, here's how I would do it.

1. Use an event loop to detect which sockets are ready
2. Put those sockets in a queue
3. Create a stack of threads to deal with sockets (1 for each core). When they finish, put them back on the stack.
4. Assign work to threads.
5. Cache all image files in memory.

This is essentially what IO completion ports are minus the caching of files. This model is available in Windows and Solaris.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963891.aspx

_{(source: microsoft.com)}