Comments on: Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site

By: Alfieman

Alfieman — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:01:20 +0000

Massive numbers. I have worked with 1000 servers and a 700Terrabite SAN environment. Doesn’t scale anywhere near. I am particularly impressed with the software launch and update principle. Very robust and secure. Top marks Facebook.

By: Doctor Fox

Doctor Fox — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:04:56 +0000

This article is really very interesting in that it exposed quite a handful of the most important aspects of running a social media site like Facebook.
I have seen one article on carsonified by Steve Huffman, but that is not as detailed as this.
I love this article for its definiteness and straight to the point approach.
Well done!

By: Webmaster

Webmaster — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:06:26 +0000

This is a brilliant article, i would suggest you keep it updated with current numbers. I had no idea that fb is this huge.

So many people are hooked on it and play games etc. It would be great to see what FB plans for its future. 10 years from now they would have grown and how would they scale their infrastructure ?

By: aditia

aditia — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:43:46 +0000

yay open source rules

By: Rohit Prakash

Rohit Prakash — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:12:45 +0000

I always wanted to know that. Excellent stuff. Seeing the figures, I am a bit worried. It is clear from the figures above that facebook is spending excessively on quality and technology. Will it remain FREE?

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:51:24 +0000

@ Jim Isaacs: Might be worth pointing out regarding the number of servers… Apparently FB may now have as many as 60k servers.

By: Jim Isaacs

Jim Isaacs — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:38:12 +0000

With a site as massive as FB, I for some reason always thought they had written, or at least started to write their own kernel where the only processes are the common FB actions we know. Is this what you meant by your Linux comment?

Even trough I can understand the software and the number of machines it takes to process, what I don’t quite understand, or using better words, I can’t seem to imagine the networking power needed for a site like this. I wonder if they have 30 to 40k servers, does this mean they are essentially using 30 to 40k network addresses, or maybe half of that? How many of those servers a devoted to networking, how many are devoted to processing, and how many are devoted to storage? Basically how does their massive internal network connect and serve to the half a billion all over the world?

It’s just staggering to think that FB is running on CDN capacity, and still using a CDN.

By: Sava

Sava — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:30:32 +0000

I wish you can post the same post about Twitter, that would be awesome

By: Roel Berger

Roel Berger — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:09:46 +0000

Very interesting post, thanks for this one.
I already did a lot of research on this and most seems to match up.

One question I have left from personal research:

How do they store their PHP session data?

Because with all existing PHP session options, you will always have a single point of failure for session data, or performance issues in my opinion, speaking worldwide.
Even with memcache you can’t fill all requirements.
Do they have a custom session object they use that is stored in cassandra or something else that is blazingly fast to read/write for every pageview?

A beer for those that enlighten me on this topic

By: Ejaz

Ejaz — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:44:13 +0000

Very informative and insightful article. It is good that facebook is paying back opensoruce community by enhancing the products it uses.