How do Flickr, Youtube and other high traffic websites handle file uploads?
jdavid: so for the most part i don't think i can answer in detail, but in public situations hi5's response has been that they have a dedicated pool of servers running the upload, and they store the file on a static server.  once that server fills up, they provision a new one.  i will call this the viking image upload process, as its like a viking burial process.  each one of those images is then buffered by a CDN.i should point out that hi5 has more photo uploads per day than flickr does.