Facebook now supports 60,000 servers to serve 400 million users.
Here are a few stats on the massive popularity of Facebook. None of them should be a surprise of course, but they’re a nice illustration of what a system as big as Facebook deals with in terms of performance challenges.
- Users spend more than 16 billion minutes on Facebook each day
- Every week users share more than 6 billion pieces of content, including status updates, photos and notes.
- Each month more than 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook.
- Users view more than 1 million photos every second
- Facebook’s servers perform more than 50 million operations per second, primarily between the caching tier and web servers
- More than 1 million web sites have implemented features of Facebook Connect, making it the most popular federated identity solution on the web.
After performing all those functions, Facebook is averaging 99.7% uptime for calendar year 2010 as of June 30th. By comparison, Twitter averages 99.2% uptime. While both numbers sound pretty solid, it would seem neither service has figured out its growth issues. Those uptimes compute out to 3 hours monthly downtime for Facebook and 6 hours monthly downtime for Twitter.
Many services are contractually bound to provide certain uptime levels. Blackboard, for example, promises 99.7% uptime. Anything worse earns us some money back. Google Mail (which powers student, and staff email here at Davenport) boasts 99.9% uptime (45 minutes per month of downtime on average) as part of their contract, but there are no monetary rewards should they fail to meet this mark (incidentally, they have been at 99.94% for 2010 to date).
When a vendor, or someone on our own internal IT staff quotes an uptime in terms of percentage, it’s helpful to understand what that means, so here is a handy table to calculate downtime in minutes when someone quotes you an impressive sounding uptime number in percentage.
- 90% uptime is 72 hours a month of downtime
- 95% uptime is 36 hours a month of downtime
- 98% uptime is 14 hours a month of downtime
- 99% uptime is 7 hours a month of downtime
- 99.5% uptime is 3.6 hours a month of downtime
- 99.9% uptime is 43 minutes a month of downtime
- 99.95% uptime is 22 minutes a month of downtime
- 99.99% uptime is 4 minutes a month of downtime
- 99.999% uptime is 26 seconds a month (or 5 minutes a year) of downtime
- 99.9999% uptime is 31 seconds a year of downtime
Everyone would like 100% uptime, of course. The cost of achieving that is almost always higher than budgets will allow (because it requires massive extra servers, bandwidth, software licenses). Internally we shoot for 99.9% uptime as that seems to be a balance between cost and performance that we can all live with.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/07/twitter-how-its-down-time-comp.php
http://uptime.pingdom.com/site/month_summary/site_name/www.facebook.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
Availability requires more than just servers, of course. But Intel-based fault-tolerant servers (with nearly 99.9999% uptime) are readily available that are neither massive or expensive, especially when you consider the associated cost savings: no clustering, no failover, no unplanned downtime, no multiple OS or application licenses, and more. They take Microsoft and Linux apps out of the box, no modifications. They run VMware, too, picking up where VMware leaves off on availability. That’s important for virtualization Tier 1 apps. If you’re interested to learn more, check out my employer’s website at http://www.stratus.com. Thanks.
I’m definetly one of those users that’s on facebook. It is great but do you think Google Me is the next thing and facebook will turn into myspace?
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Interesting stuff, I’ve never seen any facts and figures for facebook and although i’d obviously expected them to be high I was quite shocked, especially that 1 million photos are viewed every second! Thanks for the insightful information.
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Facebook is massive today dominating social networking websites bot the figures shocked me greatly and 0.1% in facebook terms is massive so i guess you would say there is alot in 0.1%.
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