FaceBook, Running on 10,000 Web Servers Near You

The extremely popular social networking website Facebook met a huge growth since it was first launched on February 4, 2004. The user influx and the increased amount of horsepower required to run a Web 2.0 site led to significant infrastructure upgrades that extended the number of Facebook servers.

The social networking service now spreads across two data centers and counts no less than 10,000 servers hosting the profiles of more than 69 million users.

The news was broken by the company's VP of Technology, Jeff Rothschild, during a panel at the recent MySQL user conference. According to him, the company's hardware infrastructure has just reached 10,000 machines, including about 1,800 MySQL database servers. The MySQL machines are responsible for holding user profiles and other additional information, while the rest of the servers host photos and other binary user data.

Interesting enough, the huge herd of 1,800 MySQL servers is managed by only two system administrators, which lets us think that they're either super-heroes, or things work smooth at Facebook.

This significant server growth forced Facebook to spread its infrastructure across two data centers from DuPont Fabros (DFT) in Ashburn, Virginia and Digital Realty Trust (DLR) in Santa Clara, California. IBM is even shipping specially crafted web servers in the iDataPlex family, that are extremely optimized for running Web 2.0 applications.

"The Facebook fleet has grown fairly dramatically of late," claimed James Hamilton, Microsoft Windows Live Platform server architect. "For example, Facebook is the largest Memcached installation and the most recent reports I had come across have 200 Memcached servers at Facebook. At the Scaling MySQL panel, they report 805 Memcached servers," he continued.

Another interesting aspect is Facebook's availability to tackle such "sensitive" details. The company was willing to provide users with all the details regarding its infrastructure, unlike the industry heavyweights such as the YouTube panelists, who couldn't say what is the MySQL server count at Google's headquarters.