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Google Chrome Tops 1 Billion Users
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Venture Beat: At the I/O 2015 developer conference today, Sundar Pichai, Google's senior vice president of product, announced that Chrome has passed 1 billion active users. Less than a year ago, Google revealed Android has over 1 billion active users. These are indeed Google's biggest ecosystems. Google also shared that Google Search, YouTube, and Google Maps all have over 1 billion users as well. Gmail will reach the milestone next; it has 900 million users.
And here I am about to ditch Chrome for Firefox because the 4+gb of memory usage on desktop with a bunch of inactive tabs open is meaning I can't really do work properly anymore because my machine is liable to lock up from running out of memory. And this isn't hundreds of tabs - it's like, 30-40 tops.
Nobody teaches you how to handle 100,000,000 simultaneous user requests. Throwing more and more hardware at it is what you cannot escape when dealing with tens of millions of users a second. At least Google is not a bank, where things really need to be synchronized across accounts and be perfectly transactional. It doesn't matter to Google that there are no transactions. A piece of data presented to a user in the USA may be different than the one presented to a user in Japan, but it isaybe an answer to the same question, but the data did not propagate all the way everywhere yet. Even so, it is quite a challenge to deal with hundreds of millions of users daily and tens or hindreds of millions concurrent user requests a second. They are doing it really well too. I can only imagine the massive problems that need to be solved. It is jarring. Good stuff.
You can't handle the truth.