Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site | Royal Pingdom

See the full article for architectural insights (via Louis Gray)

Before we get into the details, here are a few factoids to give you an idea of the scaling challenge that Facebook has to deal with:

• Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner).
• There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr).
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
• Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. This doesn’t include the images served by Facebook’s CDN.
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
• Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)

Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site | Royal Pingdom