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Main on January 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.
According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.
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Main on June 12th, 2009 by Pingdom
The iPhone 3.0 update is almost here now. One of the features that we and many others have been looking forward to the most is the new push notification service from Apple. We are also curious about how reliable push notifications will be.
Why do we wonder about reliability? Because push notifications are sent from third-party servers to Apple’s servers, and then on to your iPhone.
In short: Apple becomes a single point of failure since it acts as a go-between for all push notifications.
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Main on January 5th, 2009 by Pingdom
It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.
We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?
Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.
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Posted in
Guest posts on October 24th, 2008 by Pingdom
Jeff Dean from Google recently held a lecture at the University of Washington which is highly interesting to anyone curious about the current and future challenges that face companies that operate computing on such a large scale as Google. And of course, it will give you some nice insights into how Google does things.
Since this is from Google’s perspective there are also several aspects specific to search companies, SaaS and distributed computing. It’s a very interesting lecture, easy to follow and well worth the time (it runs almost exactly an hour). You can download it or stream it from here.
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Posted in
Main on October 10th, 2008 by Pingdom
LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals, has had several periods of downtime lately. The last one came last evening (US time), and lasted just over an hour.
The website’s recurring availability issues are making us wonder if LinkedIn has perhaps started to run into scaling issues. According to their website, LinkedIn currently has more than 25 million users, compared to 14 million a year ago. That’s almost a doubling of their user base in just a year.
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Posted in
Main on August 22nd, 2007 by Pingdom
Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube, Myspace and so on? There is a very interesting website called High Scalability that is dedicated to, as they put it themselves, “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.” They collect information about the architecture of high-traffic websites [...]
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