A while back Cal Henderson, now of Flickr, gave a talk about Flickr and PHP that sparked off a discussion at Kottke called Normalized data is for sissies
, after one of Cal Henderson’s (presumably) throwaway remarks.
The slightly interesting discussion on Kottke’s weblog post was enlivened when Stewart Butterfield, who is Cal Henderson’s boss at Ludicorp chipped into the thread and said, about the charge that Flickr was slower than snot on an ice fisherman’s beard
:
Also: Slow? Is not!
and then immediately:
OK …. sometimes image serving is slow, and we’re working on that
Well, in my experience Flickr crawls. Just tested it - 26 seconds to bring up a single full-sized image 500 x 400 pixels in size. I suppose it’s something to do with the dynamic creation of a .swf file from the original image if as Stewart says it’s nothing to do with the speed of the database. But it is slow.
