Facebook Facts and Figures

Have a look at this link from Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=30695603919

They're now serving up 15 billion images a day! From the figures quoted, Facebook host 40 billion files as 1PB of storage, or 25KB per image. Peak load is 300,000 images a second, or 7.5GB per second of bandwidth.

Now I suspect (and it's not rocket science to guess) that Facebook don't store all their images in one place and they are distributed for performance and redundancy, so storage usage must be significantly higher than the quoted figure.

Growth rate is 2-3TB a day! That's up to a petabyte a year at the current rates. What's interesting is that potentially all of these images must be available to view (although most of the time the smaller preview clips will get shown first) so as Facebook grows, they must be hitting some serious issues maintaining reasonable response times.

So, how many of these images are also located elsewhere on other sites like Flickr? How many are sitting on memory sticks, hard drives and so on? I guess we'll never know, but maybe when we've One Cloud to Rule Them All, we'll have a shed load of spare disks lying around.