14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, by a fair margin, so it's bound to have some very impressive stats regarding usage and the amount of data it processes. Usually the numbers that do come out are from all manner of third-party research firms and the data can be a little unreliable. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday Facebook revealed some interesting facts about its infrastructure and the amount of data it processed daily. For example users spend 8 billion minutes on Facebook and post 45 million status updates every day.
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of Engineering, talked about the social network's infrastructure and what the engineers had done to keep up with the increasing data flow and to ensure that the site scaled as millions of new users came in. He says that Facebook now handles 2 billion pieces of content, which are shared by the users every week. Photos alone are a great challenge as users upload 2 billion new photos every month and there are now about 20 billion of them hosted by the site already. In fact, users just can't get enough of them as Facebook serves some 1.2 million photos every second.
The Facebook API, a crucial part of the service, is also seeing a big demand and got 5 billion calls on Tuesday alone thanks in no small part to the success of the Facebook Connect program, which now includes 15,000 third-party partners. Feeding all of this data requires some very fast large-scale technologies and one of the most important components is memcache, which stores some of the data in the available memory to allow easy and fast access to it. Facebook now serves 50 million operations per second with memcache and its version of the technology, which it rewrote several times, is now 5 times faster than the original.
Also at the Summit, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg answered a few questions. One of the hot issues was the newly announced Bing deal, which is still a little sketchy. She said that Bing would be able to access the stream data from all of the users and that the deal involved no money. There are also no talks with Google for the time being, hardly surprising since Microsoft has invested some $200 million in Facebook while the social network has had a rather cold relationship with Google.