How to build an image web server?

Question

I am trying to build an web image server. It serves images to lots of clients(10 thousands+) simultaneously. (It will be a easier problem if there is fewer clients.) What is a good way to do so, with time delay as small as possible.

I am new to this field. Any suggestion will be welcomed.

Answer 1

Definitely look around for a good delivery service. Akamai is the best known.

if you really want to do it on your own, forget about Apache/IIS. much more appropriate are 'light' webservers. Two very good are lighthttp and NginX (wiki). NginX in particular, has a really solid performance.

Edit: Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) have flourished in the last few years, and it's much easier to find easier and cheaper ones. In particular, it's quite simple to put your static content in Amazon's S3 and use CloudFront.