Facebook scales!
I’m really impressed with Facebook. It’s fun (totally addictive in fact), and I think it’s actually a better way to keep in touch with friends than email.
But what I’m really impressed with is how well they’re handling a massive growth in traffic. As of Feb 23 they’ve gone from zero to almost 18 million users in just over three years, an increase of 240% since last July alone.
From the Facebook blog five weeks ago:
…almost ten million different users sign into the site every day, or more than half the user base. During our biggest peaks - Sunday & Monday night around 10EST - more than one million people will be simultaneously logged into the site.
Friendster is famous for missing a huge opportunity in part because of poor performance (40 second page load times), and MySpace’s well-known and frequent reliability problems have continually frustrated their users.
According to Alexa (as of today, April 11) Facebook’s traffic is only slightly higher than Friendster’s (who have since redesigned their architecture), and still far behind Myspace’s. (Alexa’s stats may not be that reliable however.)
Regardless of the actual numbers, they’re obviously doing the right things to keep on top of the massive growth so far. Unfortunately though, I haven’t been able to find out many technical details except that they have two terabytes of RAM used by memcached.
UPDATE April 16: Apparently their traffic increased by another 50% during the month of March! (Link via Matthew Burpee on Facebook).
