Massively Scaling Facebook

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. Technology Review interviews Facebook vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer.

“I think one of the most interesting things is that we can turn a feature on. Going from zero users to 300 million users in an afternoon for a brand-new feature is pretty crazy. And we can do that because, generally speaking, we share all of the infrastructure. You can turn it on and have it go from 1 percent adoption to 100 percent adoption in a day without much or any perceived downtime.”