SAN FRANCISCO--More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day, Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said in a talk Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit here.
Mike Schroepfer
Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month--1.2 million served per second on a "peak day," he said. Five billion calls to Facebook's application program interface (API) were made on Tuesday. It's huge: Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, was focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users it has today.
One of the big challenges is that Facebook's home page news feeds have to be able to process 50 million operations per second. "We took a piece of open source software, Memcache, customized it, and deployed it," Schroepfer said as he discussed how the company keeps its home pages streamlined. "We were able to scale Memcache to five times its original performance."
He talked a bit about the company's culture, too.
"Move fast, break stuff" is one of Facebook's engineering tenets, Schroepfer explained. "Sometimes we push bugs. Sometimes we push products that people don't like." Those missteps, he said, are necessary for constant innovation. Some poorly-received modifications to the home page, for example, are about to be phased out.
The company also believes in accomplishing a lot with small teams, Schroepfer said. That's something some Facebook users might not think is such a good thing: Earlier this month a downed database at Facebook temporarily disabled about 150,000 accounts, and many took well over a week to come back. The company's chief operating officer admitted later that its response had been "too slow."
Every few months, I come across something on the Web that completely blows my mind. This morning, a friend of mine sent me a link to Nikon's Universcale Web app. It puts the entire universe into proportion, from the smallest particle to the largest measurements of space.
From the femtometer to the light year, Universcale spans 40 magnitudes of measurement into a single cosmic Web application. It's really amazing when you zoom all the way out into stars and galaxies and then realize that every time you go a magnitude higher, everything you saw before, from the flea to Mount Everest, is contained in this tiny little grid in the lower-left side of the screen. Of course, the Carl Sagan-should-be-narrating-this planetarium music helps.
If you have a few minutes and want to feel really, really small (or really, really large, or really, really disoriented), check out Universcale. It will eat up your afternoon and enlighten you as to the true size and scope of the cosmos. Not bad for a Flash app.
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