Paul Dowman

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).

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined a new venture, I’ll be leading the development for GigPark!

GigPark is a new service that will help you recommend your favorite service providers to friends and family, instantly get service recommendations from people you trust, and build your service business through word-of-mouth. Excited yet?! Me too!!

Please check out the GigPark blog for more information.

Ian Stevens has created a really nice Google Maps-based TTC Map. There are a lot of good Toronto-oriented Google Maps mashups, but for me this is one of the most useful. That and beerhunter.ca of course!

When Building Scalable Web Sites came out earlier this year (written by Cal Henderson of Flickr) I was immediately interested because I’m totally fascinated with the architecture of very large scale systems. But a quick browse through the table of contents changed my mind, it looked really basic and there were only two chapters dedicated to the “scalable” part of the subject. I was interested because the title was “Building Scalable Web Sites”, not just “Building Web Sites”.

But I happened to pick it up in a book store recently and actually flip through it a bit, and it looked interesting so I bought it. I’m glad I did, it was a surprisingly good read. It reminds me a bit of The Pragmatic Programmer: most of the material is fairly basic, but it’s worth reading even for experts because it’s well written, reasonably short, yet quite thorough.

It focuses mainly on PHP and MySQL (on Linux), but really this book is about general principles not implementation details, and those principles are equally applicable to other languages and platforms.

For a list of other technical books that I recommend, take a look at my reading page.