An analysis of Facebook photo caching
Qi ping Huang, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse, Wyatt Lloyd, Sanjeev Kumar, Harry C. Li · 2013
This paper examines the workload of Facebook's photo-serving stack and the effectiveness of the many layers of caching it employs. Facebook's image-management infrastructure is complex and geographically distributed. It includes browser caches on end-user systems, Edge Caches at ~20 PoPs, an Origin Cache, and for some kinds of images, additional caching via Akamai. The underlying image storage layer is widely distributed, and includes multiple data centers.