Strategy
Our latest strategy is taken from a great post by Paul Saab of Facebook, detailing how with changes Facebook has made to memcached they have: ...been able to scale memcached to handle 200,000 UDP requests per second with an average latency of 173 microseconds. The total throughput achieved is
Product
In Log Everything All the Time I advocate applications shouldn't bother logging at all. Why waste all that time and code? No, wait, that's not right. I preach logging everything all the time. Doh. Facebook obviously feels similarly which is why they opened sourced Scribe, their
operations
Kim Nash in an interview with Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook VP of technical operations, provides some juicy details on how Facebook handles operations. Operations is one of those departments everyone runs differently as it is usually an ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny situation. With 2,000 databases, 25 terabytes of cache, 90 million
Example
Several months ago I attended a Joyent presentation where the spokesman hinted that Joyent had the chops to support a one billion page per month Facebook Ruby on Rails application. Even under a few seconds of merciless grilling he would not give up the name of the application. Now we
Example
Update: Erlang at Facebook by Eugene Letuchy. How Facebook uses Erlang to implement Chat, AIM Presence, and Chat Jabber support. I've done some XMPP development so when I read Facebook was making a Jabber chat client I was really curious how they would make it work. While core
Example
Update: Jake in Does Django really scale better than Rails? thinks apps like FFS shouldn't need so much hardware to scale. In a short three months Friends for Sale (think Hot-or-Not with a market economy) grew to become a top 10 Facebook application handling 200 gorgeous requests per
Strategy
One of the premier scaling strategies is always: get someone else to do the work for you. But unlike Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer, you won't have to trick anyone into whitewashing a fence for you. Times have changed. Companies like Ning, Facebook, and Salesforce are more than