Facebook Talks Infrastructure, Bing

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Facebook Talks Infrastructure, Bing

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• Publié par: alurenum
• Nombre de lectures: 63
• Langue: Français

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22 October 2009

Facebook users post

45 million status

updates on the site

every day

Facebook

By: Lucian Parfeni, Web News Editor

Facebook Talks Infrastructure, Bing

Users post 45 million status updates on the site every day

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.

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