Ben's Blog World: Facebook doubles its server count from 30,000 to 60,000 in just six months

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Facebook doubles its server count from 30,000 to 60,000 in just six months

Speaking at the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Facebook's Tom Cook presented a slide that puts Facebook's rapid user growth into perspective. Actual numbers were carefully omitted, but Data Center Knowledge performed some easy deduction to conclude that the top peak represents 60,000 servers.

The plateau towards the end of 2009 represents 30,000 servers -- so they've installed 30,000 servers in just the last six months, or 166 servers per day. If you've ever wanted proof of Facebook's continued, interstellar growth, this is it!

Still, I found myself looking into the number of servers that other companies have. Facebook might vie with Google for the largest website in the world, but let's be honest: Facebook serves pictures and text. It's hardly intensive work. Check out another great article from Data Center Knowledge for some numbers -- or read my bullets:

Facebook, with 60,000 servers is big, but not that big
Google had, it is speculated, 450,000 servers in 2006 -- God knows how many they have today. Over a million?
Microsoft and Intel are probably in second place, with between 100 and 500 thousand servers. Microsoft is probably reaching a similar number to Google with the launch of its new Azure cloud processing service. Amazon likely has a similar number of servers too, but it's impossible to put an exact figure on it -- it depends just how big S3 is today!
After the big corporations come the big resellers -- GoDaddy, Rackspace, The Planet, 1&1 Internet, all with 50,000 or more servers.

With Facebook moving into search, and with other neat ideas no doubt up its big blue sleeve, I'm sure that upwards trend will continue until they have one of the biggest installations in the world.