Facebook was reported to be running 10,000 servers in April 2008, but that was the company’s total server count—not a verified count of web servers. The figure, attributed to then-VP of Technology Jeff Rothschild, included 1,800 MySQL servers.
What did Facebook’s 10,000-server figure mean?
A contemporaneous Data Center Knowledge report published April 23, 2008 said Facebook was running 10,000 servers. It attributed the number to Jeff Rothschild, Facebook’s vice president of technology, speaking at a recent MySQL conference. The report said 1,800 of those machines were MySQL servers, overseen by two database administrators.
That distinction matters: the report did not say Facebook had 10,000 front-end web servers. Its headline used “servers” to describe the overall fleet, which also supported database and other infrastructure roles. The available account is a contemporaneous report of Rothschild’s remarks, not a conference transcript.
How did Facebook divide work across servers?
In an August 2008 engineering post, Facebook described a three-tier architecture: web servers handled requests, memcache servers kept frequently needed data available without repeated database work, and MySQL databases stored the underlying data. These were different roles within a system, not interchangeable names for the same server count.
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Facebook had started using memcached in August 2005, according to its later 2013 engineering account of scaling memcache. As page loads generated increasingly sizable database queries, caching could reduce repeated database work. The account also describes a social graph with unevenly popular objects: one request could require data from many objects, while a particularly popular object could be requested by many servers.
Why did Facebook use databases in Virginia and California?
Facebook’s August 20, 2008 engineering account says the Virginia data center was intended in part to reduce latency for users in the eastern United States and Europe. It also addressed space, power, and disaster-recovery concerns. The Virginia MySQL databases were secondary replicas of databases in California; writes went to California and data was copied across the country.
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Replication introduced a consistency challenge. A Virginia cache could be invalidated before the Virginia database replica received the latest California write. If a request then refilled that cache from the replica, it could store stale data. Facebook’s account describes using information in the replication stream to invalidate the Virginia cache when the changed object arrived at the secondary.
The post says replication lag was normally under one second and could rise to 20 seconds during high load. To account for that delay, load balancers could route requests for safe pages to Virginia, while writes went to California. After a write, a cookie kept subsequent requests in California for 20 seconds to give replication time to catch up.
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How is the 2008 count different from later figures?
Facebook Engineering described a different scale in a 2016 account of serving Facebook at scale: each cluster consisted of more than 10,000 servers. That is a per-cluster figure from a later architecture, not the total-fleet figure reported in 2008. The post says most user traffic passed through front-end clusters, where web servers were a major component; those servers ran HHVM for Hack and PHP.
The later account also gives an 11 kW rack-level power budget as context for server design. It describes the workload as latency-sensitive and throughput-bound, with requests able to scale out using PHP’s stateless execution model. These details describe the 2016 system and should not be read back into the composition of the 2008 fleet.
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Did Facebook disclose a web-server count?
No verified web-server-only total is established by the sources cited here. A 2010 Data Center Knowledge FAQ said Facebook did not disclose its web-server count. It also noted staff presentations suggesting at least 60,000 total servers in June 2010; that was a historical estimate, not a current figure.
These reports and engineering posts are dated snapshots. They do not establish Facebook’s current server count or the present-day composition of its infrastructure.
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