
How Facebook Copes with 300 Million Users - mgcreed
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23508/?a=f
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mcantor
A question that's been on my mind: Why did Facebook scale so well and Twitter
scale so poorly? Is there really any way to learn how to cope with huge load
before you actually hit the point where you need it?

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guybrush0
From the article it sounds like Facebook made a huge investment in people to
build the bespoke (software) infrastructure that they needed. eg. A bespoke
in-memory database, their "own storage system called Haystack that's
completely built on top of commodity hardware", etc.

Facebook have an order of magnitude more employees than Twitter which probably
makes those kind of bespoke uber-scaling advancements feasible.

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kierank
_A bespoke in-memory database,_

They use memcached with some nasty kernel hacks.

(Caused some friction when they forked an old version, added new code which
was then suddenly unleashed on the community without warning. Each new feature
then had to be manually added to the current version)

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fjabre
Such an awful problem to have. I feel horrible for the employees there. =)

