Facebook Users - Milestone For Facebook

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Today we hit an important milestone for Facebook - half a billion users. It's particularly exciting to those of us in engineering and operations who build the systems to handle this massive growth. I started at Facebook four years ago when we had seven million users (which seemed like a really big number at the time) and the technical challenges along the way have been just as crazy as you might imagine.

A few of the big numbers we deal with:
* 500 million active users
* 100 billion hits per day
* 50 billion photos
* 2 trillion objects cached, with hundreds of millions of requests per second
* 130TB of logs every day

Over the years we've written on this page about a number of the technical solutions we've used to handle these numbers. Today, I'd like to step back and talk about some of the general ways we think about scaling, and some of the principles we use to tackle scaling problems. Like Facebook itself, these principles involve both technology and people. In fact, only a couple of the principles below are entirely technical. At the end of the day it's people who build these systems and run them, and our best tools for scaling them are engineering and operations teams that can handle anything. The scaling statistic I'm most proud of is that we have over 1 million users per engineer, and this number has been steadily increasing.
#facebook #facebook news
  • Profile picture of the author ThomM
    So that's why Facebook was down this afternoon.
    Get off the Warrior forum and go back to work
    Signature

    Life: Nature's way of keeping meat fresh
    Getting old ain't for sissy's
    As you are I was, as I am you will be
    You can't fix stupid, but you can always out smart it.

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    • Profile picture of the author ConcordeWarrior
      With such a huge number of users there should be some BIG money to be made out of that site...

      Feel free to PM me if you know how.
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