Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As Sandy Jen over at Meebo can tell you, chat is a challenge to scale because it requires a constantly open connection to the servers and low latency. That’s a recipe for a lot of hardware and some flexible architecture. Good thing Facebook has $100 million to spend, but bad news for the firm if the money spigot closes.
My problem with their claims of scaling with Facebook chat are the hyperbole involved. They are claiming that chat is used with every user account, even accounts that are abandoned. There are also many of us who either refuse to use it, or use an unsupported browser (like Camino). I’d like to see the actual numbers of how many active users are utilizing the chat.