Scaling Facebook To 140 Million Users

1sockchuck writes "Facebook now has 140 million users, and in recent weeks has been adding 600,000 new users a day. To keep pace with that growth, the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Comments

Thank goodness

[KeithJM]

I was losing sleep worrying that people sending me virtual Christmas tree decorations, garden accessories and such would have to wait 3 seconds after they clicked send.

Re:Thank goodness

[zappepcs]

I know what you mean, but I don't have that trouble much. Using FF with plugins I don't see much advertising at all. Sometimes, when I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll surf using the SeaMonkey browser because I left it default bare. That way I can see all those ads from doubleclick et al if I want to.

Sad but true, I don't get nostalgic much :-)

Re:Thank goodness

[Fred_A]

I did my bit a while ago by closing my Facebook account. If you care about Facebook, vote with your, um, mouse !

Support Facebook ! Close your account !

[Unintelligible] Facebook [Unintelligible]

[Jonah Bomber]

The only word I understood in this post was "Facebook."

Re:[Unintelligible] Facebook [Unintelligible]

[Arthur B.]

You're wrong, that's five word.

Re:[Unintelligible] Facebook [Unintelligible]

[CannonballHead]

If you want to be *quite* technical (and I think it's quite hilarious we're being modded "informative" and "insightful"), the string "140 millions" would be broken into only four words in correct English: One hundred forty millions.

I presume the "five words" comes from the usual way to say it, one hundred and forty millions, which is technically incorrect as the "and" should refer to the decimal point, as in thirty-two and five one-hundredths.

I am unsure about the hyphen between one and hundred, though...

Since it's that time of the year...

[XPeter]

...I thought I should make a Christmas carol about what we see on the net everyday.

Smashing through the door, comes Firefox three browsing sites we go laughing at IE all the way ha ha ha!

Steve Ballmer yells on youtube, making children cry. Oh what fun it is to see that stupid Windows guy. Hey!

Jingle bells Digg smells Slashdot all the way! Oh what fun it is to post on facebook every day, yay!

Re:Pretty impressive operation

[SatanicPuppy]

Yea, but if they could do it with Windows, now that would be a challenge!

Re:Wow

[aliquis]

"Your business sound more important with VmWare!"

Re:... And Yet Very Lacking From a Security Angle

[dubbreak]

That link is dead. Could repost a working link?

I really need that application. I get so many viruses.

Yeah, but how many REAL users are there?

[Wyck]

And 150 million of those users are bots.

Either that or facebook has tonnes of supermodels that have only two or three friends. ...not that I've been searching ;)

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

From hardware perspective, Facebook uses 10,000 web servers and 1800 database servers to handle the massive traffic.

That's funny because the Russian Business Network uses a 250,000 strong zombie botnet to create the Facebook accounts and massive traffic...

Upgrading....

[supernova_hq]

Our chance to slashdot facebook is diminishing as we speak!

Re:Yes,

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

What are these "parties" you speak of?