Paul Dowman

I’ll be speaking at the FutureRuby conference, which will be held in Toronto from July 9-12. If it’s anything like last year’s RubyFringe conference (also put on by the hard-working Unspace crew) it will be a great time, and anything but your standard tech conference.

I’m looking forward to hearing some great talks and meeting lots of interesting new people (the evening events alone are worth the price of the ticket!).

For more info check out the web site and follow @futureruby on Twitter.

Did you know that you can enable access logging on S3? Did you know that you can add arbitrary metadata to objects in S3? Did you know that you can serve compressed content from S3?

The S3 Cookbook, an e-book written by Scott Patten, has easy-to-follow recipes to do those and about 60 other things (including one that I contributed for backing up a MySQL database to S3). In addition to the recipes, it also has chapters on S3’s architecture, authenticating S3 requests, and an overview of the S3 API.

You can checkout the full table of contents and download a sample chapter.

It’s published on Sopobo, a new platform for authors to self-publish technical books (that also happens to be created by Scott!). Sopobo includes tools for readers to interact with each other and with the author. If I were writing a book that I planned to shop around to a few publishers I’d seriously consider putting it on there first to get some feedback (and make a few bucks) before it got picked up.

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).

UPDATE December 18, 2008: Facebook’s growth continues; they’re now adding 600,000 new users a day, and it’s still fast and highly available. As a Facebook developer I know they have the occasional glitch but knowing what kind of growth they’re going through I’m impressed with the level of service they maintain!