how much is that again?

News items on the ubiquity of social networking are ubiquitous; no need to add to them here. Except the stats can be staggering. Here, from the FaceBook blog, are some numbers for just one site. My favorite: The site has 30 billion page views monthly and soaks up 1% of all time spent on the internet.

Have a taste... by Carolyn Abram

We had our first ever "Technology Tasting" this past Wednesday. It was a full house of Facebook engineers, product team members, and engineers in the area who just wanted a taste of Facebook.

We had a slide show presentation at the Tasting with some pretty cool Facebook stats that we don't normally release. However, we think they'd be interesting to a lot of people (and have seen pictures of them floating around the blogosphere), so we thought we'd give all the readers here a taste as well.

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This is our overall growth graph. You can see us moving from 7.5 million users last July to almost 18 million users now. Over half of our users log in daily.

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This is our page views graph. We're now at 30 billion page views monthly. According to comScore, we are the 6th most trafficked US site, and we account for 1% of all time spent on the internet.


Some more fast facts:

• We have more than 1 billion photos on the site.


• To keep up with the huge amount of data that needs to be rapidly accessed at any given time, we utilize 2 Terabytes of RAM distributed across many Memcache servers.


• Our fleet of servers are hosted across two co-locations.


• Our search infrastructure fields 600 million searches each month using a 200-gigabyte search index, featuring real time updates.

Carolyn, Facebook's resident blogger, was pretty delighted to refer to our servers as a "fleet"

{Crossposted from my work blog -- Friday off-topic posting.}