XenForo community

Nah... too much work to make it useable for other people. Like there is no mechanism to move existing avatars to it. So it would only be useful for sites that had no avatars currently. And the amount of work to make it something useable for others doesn't really sound like a fun thing to spend time on.

What do you mean avatars in database? You store a graphical image in a database?

Yep... We use multiple web servers so storing avatars and attachments in the file system doesn't work for us.

Is loading avatars from a database even really efficient? Wouldn't using a file distribution server or service such as s3 be better?

It's more efficient than keeping files on multiple servers in sync every time there is a change.

As far as using S3, no real point. My cluster is faster, more efficient and in some ways more scalable than S3. My database cluster can handle ~30M queries per second. So adding 10 or so per minute (when you cache images properly) isn't even something you can notice/measure.