Facebook Now Has 30,000 Servers to Serve Over 300 Million Users

Search engine giant Google has about 1 million servers and 3 million computers to support over 400 million daily search queries. How about the world’s most popular social networking website Facebook? Well, the answer is 30,000. According Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, the Californian-based Internet company now has 30,000 servers to support their day to day operations. Currently, Facebook has 300 million registered users and hosts more than 80 billion images (20 billion images, each in four sizes).

Here are some other interesting facts and figures about Facebook’s photos and data vault…

- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day

- Over one petabyte of photo storage

- Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second.

- Logs over 25 Terabytes of data on a daily basis, the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the U.S. Postal Service.

Earlier this month, Facebook lost data for over 150,000 user accounts due to a database outage. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted that the company’s response to the outage was slow. “It’s a very small percentage of our users, but it’s a lot of people,” Sandberg said of the affected users. “We want them to be able to (access Facebook) every day. We resolved it in about a week and a half. I think that was too slow.”

So Facebook, no matter how much firepower you’ve in your servers, you still need a relatively decent backup methodology and good customer service. Till date, Facebook has about 230 engineers on staff, serving over 300 million users around the world, which is equivalent to 1 employee per 1.3 million users. That’s insane!

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