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Scalability, Distributed Computing and Cloud Storage

Our team aims to get the most of what is there. Development and testing have been focused on smaller servers and typical home users with less than 500,000 files.

While PhotoPrism has been reported to run well on 24 cores or more, we can not invest a lot of time in optimizing it for enterprise-class servers. There are more important feature requests waiting - and most users don't actually own such hardware.

If the primary focus was on larger servers or clusters, the current architecture might be different in some aspects, and had other tradeoffs. For example, relying on database locking and conflict resolution tends to be inefficient with an increasing number of cores and workers. On the other hand, this simplifies application logic, especially when running multiple instances on the same index.

Traditional database servers like MariaDB might be slower and less powerful than specialized NoSQL or in-memory engines. They are often better documented and easier to maintain for the majority of users though.

Also, there is no native support for sharding or cloud storage APIs like S3. Instead, PhotoPrism prefers a fast, local solid-state drive. Support for S3 may be added for backing up originals later.

We are happy to assist if you need a custom solution that runs well in a corporate cloud environment.