The Web Spends 8 Billion Minutes Online Everyday Using Facebook
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Basically, Schroepfer’s key point is that Facebook is not afraid to be bold and take risks to get done what it needs to from an engineering perspective. They’ve come up with a number of their own solutions to solve a massive scaling problem, and sometimes we (the users) see bugs as a result of that. But, in a world where the much smaller Twitter goes down regularly, Facebook’s relative stability is pretty impressive.
How impressive? Schroepfer threw out some huge numbers. Among them:
- Users spend 8 billion minutes online everyday using Facebook
- There are some 2 billion pieces of content shared every week on the service
- Users upload 2 billion photos each month
- There are over 20 billion photos now on Facebook
- During peak times, Facebook serves 1.2 million photos a second
- Yesterday alone, Facebook served 5 billion API calls
- There are 1.2 million users for every engineer at Facebook
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Below find the earlier live notes (paraphrased)
- What do people do on Facebook everyday?
- 8 billion minutes online everyday, using Facebook.
- 2 billion pieces of content shared every week
- Over 2 billion photos uploaded each month
- Over 20 billion photos now on Facebook.com
- Serving over 1.2 million photos a second on a peak day.
- Yesterday we served 5 billion API calls
- Facebook connect is growing even faster than Facebook
- In over a year we went from 100 million daily actives to 300 million daily actives
- When Zuckerberg started the site, it was only Harvard, then more schools were added, but they were silos. Then we connected those schools, then in 2006 we opened it up.
- It’s way bigger than a single database, so you have to spread this data out.
- Rendering a homepage on Facebook, which do it a couple billion times a day, in a couple of seconds.
- We use something we built which we call “multifeed” which we use along with memcache to get data in milliseconds.
- 50 million operations a second via memcache
- We scaled memcache 5 X its original performance – we rewrote it
- Importance of our culture:
- Move Fast – sometimes we push bugs, but that’s innovation
- Huge impact – 1.2 million users for every engineer at Facebook
- Be Bold – change something if we need to.
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