Facebook Is Powered by over 30,000 Servers

Facebook is the world's largest social network by a large margin. With 300 million users and closing in on 350 million by the year's end, the social network is one of the most visited places online. And because of the nature of the service people tend to stick around for longer navigating the site. Add to that the fact that it is already, again by a fair margin, the world's largest online photo host and it's safe to assume that serving all of this data requires some serious computing muscle. How much muscle? Well, Facebook now boasts some 30,000 servers in its data centers and it's adding more every day.

In a presentation last week VP of Technology at Facebook Jeff Rothschild revealed some interesting stats about the popular social network's infrastructure. “Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition,” Rothschild wrote in the presentation's abstract.

The most impressive number is the 30,000 servers it now employs, which put the site in some rather select company with only a handful of names, a who's who of the web and tech world, having this much computing power. Facebook has been increasing server capacity at rapid rate and has added 20,000 servers in the last 18 months. In fact, the company took out a $100 million loan just for this purpose and it’s safe to assume a large portion of it has already been spent.

Facebook definitely needs the capacity as it’s serving huge amounts of data every day. The social network now hosts some 80 billion images, 20 billion photos each in four different sizes. As you can imagine, they take up a lot of space but the biggest problem is actually delivering them to the users as the social network now serves up to 600,000 photos every second. The site also amasses about 25 terabytes of data every day just from the logs it keeps. The staggering part is that Facebook manages to handle more than 300 million users with just 230 engineers, one engineer for more than one million users.