Server for distribution of statics (images)

Question

System administration

Tell me what you should pay attention to when choosing a server that is designed to distribute a large number of statics (images, 90% of connections behind pictures up to 20kb, about 10% of connections behind pictures 30-100kb).

I suppose NGINX will deal with the distribution.

SATA/SAS/SATA drives?
Is a large amount of RAM required?
Is the processor important for this task?

What will be the bottleneck here?

Answer 1

The processor is not very important. Better with fewer cores, but with more frequency.
Disks are better than sas. More operatives.
The network interface can easily become a bottleneck if properly configured.

Answer 2

If you do not compress the pictures by this server, then the disks or the channel will be the bottleneck, as the previous comrades said.
Judging by the experience of the same flickr, I would advise you to take a processor that is not the weakest, and hang image resizing (creating previews, etc.) on it in order to free up the main one for other tasks - this will be more efficient and the file server processor will not be idle. This is of course if you need resizing (or any other task that is sensitive to the processor).
I find it difficult to say in terms of RAM, but in theory you won’t need much.

Answer 3

The bottleneck is likely to be the disk subsystem in this case. Choose fast disks + fs without journaling and designed to work with small files.

Answer 4

You will distribute 100 Mbps of pictures without resizing with any basin. Stick more memory, only.
On gigabit it is better to put SSD.
If there are a lot of pictures, then they correctly write about storing hot caches in memory, and cold ones on ssd.
In general, the main thing here will be to think about how it will lie on the FS, so that seek does not eat for a long time.