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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

Considering they have 10,000 servers+, I don't think "scaling" is that big a feat.

So say they have every active user on at the same time (70million), and say they have 10,000 servers. That's only 7k users per server??? Not great IMHO

Maybe if they only had 1,000 servers, then it'd be a little more impressive.

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Coordinating something that large is a feat. At that scale, everything is more difficult. Deploying updates to 10,000 machines, redundancy, upgrading, etc. Not to mention the avoiding bandwidth, memory, and process limitations, load balancing, and testing it, which they needed a clever solution to achieve.

I'm sure a big number of these servers is used for data crunching/warehousing and ad serving -- not just for rendering pages.

Yea, 10,000 servers is a serious number - is that actually an accurate figure?

"Facebook does not disclose the number of servers it operates. But research firm Data Center Knowledge puts the tally at about 10,000. The slug of cash will help Facebook buy approximately 50,000 more servers"

60,000 servers? Jesus christ. Are they planning to scale to take account of Alien users or something?

the 10k number was spilled a few weeks ago at a conference... along with numbers from some other groups like mysql and others.

What I don't understand is why Facebook feels slow each time I logon with these 10K servers - its often one of the slowest sites I visit!

If they are intending to have 60K servers, they better keep a slug of that cash around to pay the electric bill!

I realized recently that Facebook is trying to rebuild the entire Web inside their site. Home pages, check. Email, check. IM, calendaring, photo sharing, dating, check. Next they will add VoIP, photo editing, an office suite...

So how many servers do you need to replace the entire Web? 60,000 doesn't sound like enough.

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