Open source helps Facebook achieve massive app scalability

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Feb 24 2010
People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month, 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

Loved by millions, Facebook has risen from a small-time university social networking service to become the biggest phenomenon on the Internet. But in Facebook's case popularity doesn’t come easily. With some 400 million unique home pages, Facebook is pushing the boundaries of traditional Web application scalability -- and the company is not shy about admitting that much of this success has been achieved by leveraging open source software.

Late last year Facebook announced it had surpassed the 300 million user mark. A significant (and growing) number in its own right, but what makes Facebook different is that users do not simply access a page for a search query, but instead actively upload content and interact with other subscribers. If Web analytics company Alexa is accurate, Facebook users spend more than 30 minutes per day using the service -- about three times more than Google. Therefore, the data processing requirements of Facebook make its scalability challenges even more daunting.

Facebook’s core service is built on top of the venerable LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP is used by millions of Web sites across the Internet to serve dynamically generated data. Facebook’s rapid rise in popularity in recent years has seen it grow to the point where it now operates the largest single-domain LAMP stack in the world. Source