Facebook’s 300 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on the site each day, according to the social network’s VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. He offered up the number onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit Wednesday as proof of the infrastructure challenges the social network faces relative to other web sites. On a busy day, an eye-popping 1.2 million photos are served on Facebook each second, he added.
And the more than 15,000 sites that have integrated Facebook Connect mean the site has API demands it has to address, too. Facebook was accessed via its API 5 billion times yesterday alone, according to Schroepfer.
To accommodate all that data without damaging the user experience and stifling innovation, Schroepfer said Facebook has rewritten its memcache multiple times so that now deploys five times faster than before. But even though Facebook continues to augment its engineering team to keep up with its growing audience, he said there’s 1.2 million users per Facebook engineer. No wonder the company is looking to expand its staff by 40-50 percent this year.
The “Share” button after the article doesn’t include Facebook among its list of social media/sharing websites.
Really? Even Google Bookmarks is there, and those are BOOKMARKS!