5 ms·
The scale at which Meta operates at really boggles my mind. I work with an ex facebook guy who was on the infra side of things and the numbers he told me.. I co
by kache_ 5y ago
The scale at which Meta operates at really boggles my mind. I work with an ex facebook guy who was on the infra side of things and the numbers he told me.. I couldn't even imagine. And I'm working on the order of magnitude of 100m/h, but still, completely different set of challenges.
- silisili 5y agoSame. I remember asking one guy at FB the process to ask for a new server. He said he can't even open a request for anything less than a thousand boxes. The largest fleet I'd worked on at that point was 12... different worlds.
- lclarkmichalek 5y agoI mean, that's not true in the general case. That'd be incredibly wasteful. (Work at Meta, mostly on capacity)
- mescaline 5y ago
- ryeguy 5y agoThis is a technical post, stay on topic and stop posting flamewar bait.
- mescaline 5y ago
- ethanwillis 5y agoIt's not flamewar bait unless you turn it into that. It can be a fruitful discussion.
- aliceryhl 5y agoIt's not flamewar content yet, but it definitely is flamewar bait.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- summerlight 5y agoYeah, I guess it probably is some sort of criteria that requires a formal request? The resource under that number might be automatically provisioned via "freebie quota" per team. I don't work for Meta but I believe most of the big techs work in a similar way.
- silisili 5y agoCurious - do you know what he could have been referring to? SRE position, 6-8 years ago.
- lclarkmichalek 5y agoA bit before my time, but maybe a physical capacity order, to a non fungible pool. The infra is quite different now (mostly to avoid this kind of inefficiency)
- fleddr 5y agoI once read that Facebook was opening 2 or 3 massive new data-centers in the US for the purpose of hosting stale content. You may have posted a photo 7 years ago, and statistics show that basically nobody ever revisits it. However, in case you do, it needs to be there. So these enormous buildings do basically nothing, but still need to be there. It makes me wonder how it can go on like this. Users only keep adding content and never remove it. The income per user cannot grow forever, storage cannot get infinitely cheap, the model has to break one day?
- jreese 5y agoThere's no meaningful benefit to dedicating any amount of DC equipment just to stale content. Those are spindles (and networks) that could be taking meaningful hot reads and writes, and colocating stale and hot data is generally a better use of capacity than concentrating hot data in fewer locations.
- darkwater 5y agoWhat you say totally makes sense but still, even if new media takes more storage space, the accumulated stale date in the long run will win. Or maybe I'm underestimating how much space newer material needs?
- fleddr 5y agoExactly. And that doesn't even take into account higher res photos and 4K video. I remember the staggering statistic where just Instagram sees 100 million photos added per day, every day. And that was years ago.
- gitfan86 5y agoInstagram does not guarantee photo quality. They can resize photos anytime they want. Eventually they turn 10 year old photos that have not been viewed in 9 years into thumbnails or just delete them.