Clarence Eldefors blog Mostly about the web and technology

22Jul/100

Huge server architectures

I enjoy to read about the architecture about some of the bigger internet related systems around. Be it about database sharding, Hadoop usage, choice of languages or development methods. I will continuously try to post some numbers from these adventures. Here is a start together with links that can be followed for more details.

Facebook

From Data Center Knowledge quoting a talk at Structure 2010 by Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger.
- 400 million users.
- 16 billion minutes spend on Facebook each day.
- 3 billion new photos per month
- More than a million photos viewed per second.

- Probably over 60,000 servers at date (Data Center Knowledge)
- Thousands of memcache servers. Most likely the biggest memcache cluster (Pingdom).

Akamai

- 65,000 servers spanning 70 countries and 1000 networks.
- Hundreds of billions "Internet interactions" per day
- Traffic peaks at 2 Terabits per second
Source: Akamai

Google

- Server number estimated at 450,000 at 2006 (High Scalability)
- Server number estimated at 1 million by Gartner (Pandia)