I'm a geek, so finding the answers to this kind of stuff like this is interesting to me, and I hope to some of you, too: How big is FaceBook's Database?? Can we do some sort of calculation? I'd like to see if we can come to a number, and then check with the real company at some point... if we get close and it sounds about right... I'll donate even more $ to the tipjar in honor of our work together. OK, maybe I'll donate money even if we're not remotely close. My guess is that I had calculated a good 400 TB, but I know I'm leaving out storage like photos stored or links to external sources. What's your educated guess? (2000 servers * 200Gb each)
I see people posting pictures like no tomorrow Hundreds of them I am wondering if there is a limit Rocket River
I used to do work with Google and Yahoo. They both had more than 400K servers by some estimates. The guys that built google's server farm are running facebook's. There is even a video on facebook about one of their datacenters.
Yeah, I figure there are thousands of servers connected. Here is one article from last year that talks about 2008's numbers... so I made somewhat of a calculation based on that... I know I'm WAY off: http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-trapped-in-mysql-fate-worse-than-death/ I don't think the database holds their photos... I believe it's an indexed ID pointing to the photo file somewhere on a different server. Still sounds crazy, nonetheless.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2036928,00.html The first pic says 10's of thousands of servers.
To " " even further, that's from April 2011. YIKES. That's just servers. I am asking about its database, only.
My professional guess is 4383474891265904031280940309418ß9430582931839418043 GB. Yes I calculated that in hours of work.
500,000,000 users on Facebook. On average, let's say they each posted 500MB of data (might be generous to some, not enough to others). Thus, 250,000,000,000MB = 244,140,625GB = 238,419TB = 233PB I'll be conservative. 200 petabytes. That's total storage, though, not the size of their database. Their DB is likely a lot leaner and only has pointers to where the photos/video/etc. are. It might even have pointers to user statuses, etc. Without knowing the internal structure of the DB, it's really hard to estimate it. It might only contain strict user data (permissions, preferences, etc.) and could only be a few terabytes.
