[GENERAL] using Postgres to store many small files

[Matthew Hixson]

I am currently working on a Java web application in which we are making 
use of the JDBC driver for Postgres 7.4.1.  Part of our application 
allows the administrators to manage a large number of small images, 
most of them not exceeding 5KB.  There is about a gigabyte of these 
small files.  We're currently storing the files on disk and the other 
information about the file in the database (historical reasons that I 
won't complain about here).
  I recently discovered the Hibernate project and was pleasantly 
surprised how simple it was to store an image in Postgres as a bytea 
using Hibernate's BLOB support.  I'm wondering if Postgres would have 
any problem handling all of our files if we were to put them into 
Postgres as bytea data.  And how well would Postgres scale as the 
number of files increased?
  Our Java application and Postgres are currently running on the same 
machine, a dual Xeon 2.6Ghz with 1GB of RAM.  We are currently not 
working this machine very hard at all.
  Thanks,
    -M@

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