HOW FACEBOOK WORKS | ABOUT ITS DATA CENTRES, SERVERS, MEMORY STORAGE!

A Short Post on How Facebook Works! About its Data Centres, Servers, Storage, etc. In my previous post I’ve given a briefhistory and origin of Facebook. Now let me tell you about how such a huge Social Networking Site manages to store its data and servers.  Initially a set of few Harvard Students had coded facebook. And Mark Zukerberg named his coded website as ‘thefacebook’.

So how does this $100 Billion Dollar website manage to store so many Photos and Information of a Billion people?

Handling the Profile Information and Photos of about a Billion people is not so easy, because according to present stats it says that around 250 Million photos are Uploaded onto facebook everyday. So, it becomes a very difficult task for storage of such huge amount of photos and Videos. It all about how technology is used at a High scale. Here users are growing at a rate of 100 Million new users every 6 months.

So handling information of such massive amount of people is not that easy. At facebook there is 1 Engineer appointed to handle the information for Every 100 Million users. There is no other website which has got such huge amount of traffic.  But, the main issue or task here is Storage. For this Facebook has setup its mainData Centre a Very Huge one at Prineville, Oregon, United States. A huge data centre of 300 thousand sq. feet. Here is where your information is stored in massive memory banks. It has around 20 million feets of Fiber Optic cables which transfer data at the speed of light. These Fiber Optic cables Connect a never ending row of servers.

Ken Patchett is the General Manager of this Data Centre who manages everything there. Whenever a person types facebook.com on a URL of a browser and Logs in the Open Internet’s request straight goes and lands on to the data centre at Oregon and there a request is sent to one of the facebook Server, where all your complete profile information and everything is processed and complied and it is sent back onto your screen. And the interesting part of this is that all this huge process happens just in milliseconds.J

Many people think that facebook and internet are like clouds which float on the air. But, it not like that it’s a physical structure like these huge data centres all around the world and these data centres all around the world can contact with each other. This data centre uses 30 MegaWatts of power, so any power failure may lead to loss of huge data. So, just in case of such an issues it also has diesel invertors which can produce such power. Now its also trying to produce most of its power from solar energy.

Such Huge number of servers produce a lot of heat and if these are not kept cool then everything will Get crashed! So it has got Huge Air Conditioning systems.

And talking about the software part of it facebook uses a variety of tools and programming languages. It runs on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

So that’s all about how the World’s top Social Networking Site – Facebook. And that’s how it manages a Billion Users information using it huge data centres. J