How Facebook Copes with 300 Million Users

Last week, the world’s biggest social network, Facebook, announced that it had reached 300 million users and is making enough money to cover its costs.

The challenge of dealing with such a huge number of users has been highlighted by hiccups suffered by some other social-networking sites. Twitter was beleaguered with scaling problems for some time and became infamous for its “Fail Whale”–the image that appears when the microblogging site’s services are unavailable.

In contrast, Facebook’s efforts to scale have gone remarkably smoothly. The site handles about a billion chat messages each day and, at peak times, serves about 1.2 million photos every second. Read More… [via technologyreview]