Photo uploads and scalability

[Ian Evans]

Getting ready to work on a new section of the site which will require a 
reader to upload a photo and write a caption.

It's my first time writing anything to do with uploading and I'm 
wondering what things in the nginx realm I need to consider so the 
system doesn't get bogged down. Nginx is a dream for us serving files, 
but since I've never handled uploads, what pitfalls/traps/surprises do I 
need to be prepared for?


I'd like to think of scalability from day one so I'm not trying to fix 
something under load. Right now I have one server. Is there anyway to 
prepare my nginx.conf for easily handling, say, new servers getting 
added/removed in the cloud?

[Hey, we might get 1 upload a week or a million a day, so it's good to 
be prepared.]

 From a programming end I already know I'll queue any post-processing 
and inform the reader when it's done so that process can be handled by 
my local server or cloud instances etc.

Thanks for any tips!