7 ms·

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

sebzim4500 3y ago
Sounds plausible. There are probably many queries required to display a page and Facebook has 2 billion daily active users.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  This is how information slowly changes. The original numbers from facebook needed to be taken with a grain of salt. 2 billion a day raises it more. Facebook claims to have 2 billion accounts but no where near 2 billion unique accounts. I don't know what facebook calls an active user but it use to mean logged in once in the past 30 days.
  - reissbaker 3y ago
    No, the person you're responding to was correct. Facebook has over 2 billion daily active users [1], and DAU refers to unique users who used the product in a day [2]. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d... 2: https://www.innertrends.com/blog/active-users-measuring-business-success-with-dau-wau-and-mau https://www.innertrends.com/blog/active-users-measuring-busi...
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      It's directly in the link you provided. "For example, an active user can be measured as a user that has logged back into her account to interact with the product in the last 30 days." Even the marketing material is designed to confuse.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        It should be their account not her account (or his). Who writes this garbage.
        OrsonSmelles 3y ago
        Alternating or stochastically varying pronouns in your examples used to be a common way to make an effort at inclusive writing, usually preferred aesthetically to constructs like `his/her'. (The style before that was basically to use masculine pronouns for hypothetical people in every single case and deny that there was anything to question about that.) I think I agree that the modern semi-standard of using `they' for examples where gender is irrelevant or unknown is strictly better, but it's hard for me to summon a lot of contempt for someone who goes with a different/older habit.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        That's a monthly active user. A daily active user would be someone who logged into an account in the last day. Generally monthly active user count will be higher than daily active users, but for something like Facebook the difference is about 50% (which is what the second article linked is explaining, if you read more than just cherry-picking a line that matches your preconceptions) And yes, that's a claim that if each user is a separate person, >20% of the world's population interacts with Facebook at least minimally each day. You can add your own interpretation about how many of the accounts are bots or otherwise duplicates, but it's a staggering amount either way.
    - zilti 3y ago
      Heh. Gave me a chuckle, because DAU also means "Dümmster Anzunehmender User" in German (dumbest assumed user, in context of creating idiot-proof software, and a wordplay on GAU, which means grösster anzunehmender Unfall, biggest assumed accident, which comes from fission power plants). And that kinda fits for the kind of people that perceivedly are left on the likes of Facebook and X.
  - pests 3y ago
    Different metrics Daily vs Monthly Active User. MAU vs DAU
IncreasePosts 3y ago
I forgot how to count that low.
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Yeah, they allocated ALL of the ram to their DB servers. lol
storyinmemo 3y ago
I think about 10 years ago when I was working there I checked the trace to load my own homepage. Just one page, just for myself, and there were 100,000 data fetches.
- vaylian 3y ago
  By "homepage" you mean your Facebook profile?
gaogao 3y ago
Those queries are probably mostly memcache hits, though of course with distributed cache invalidation and consistency fun
- ipaddr 3y ago
  If it doesn't hit the database is it really a query?
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
    Why wouldn't it be?
bagels 3y ago
I can't comment on the numbers, but think of how many engineers work there and how many users Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram have. Each engineer is adding new features and queries every day. You're going to get a lot of queries.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  We’ve really wasted an incredible amount of talent-hours over last couple decades. Imagine if we’d worked on, like, climate change or something instead of ad platforms.
  - esafak 3y ago
    "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher (2011); early Facebook employee, and Cloudera cofounder. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/quote-ad-generation/349689/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/quote...
  - baby 3y ago
    You make it sound like everybody at Meta works in the ads department.
    - Scubabear68 3y ago
      They all do.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      98% of Meta's revenue is from ads. Meta is an ads department.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      It is an ad company, everyone there works on ads or indirectly works on making a platform for ads. The only exception is people who’ve managed to sneak their way into positions where they don’t contribute anything to the company. Those people are doing society a favor by wasting Facebook’s money.
reissbaker 3y ago
A custom JIT + language + web framework + DB + queues + orchestrator + hardware built to your precise specifications + DCs all over the world go a long way ;)
AlienRobot 3y ago
iirc Facebook has 3 billion users, so that sounds plausible.
ndriscoll 3y ago
Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough money to make them extremely profitable despite it.
- golergka 3y ago
  Wasn't the whole point of GraphQL in mitigating this?
  - serial_dev 3y ago
    Yeah, that's why you have only 100 requests* when you hover over an item instead of 800. (* allegedly, didn't verify it myself)
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    No. Here is the thing, hypermedia is cacheable. React/Graphql not so much. Facebook is now just an application that runs in the browser. As a poor, small developer who doesn't want to hemorrhage money, I tend to want things to be more hypermedia and less app. It saves on complexity and bandwidth and costs.
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  Could someone tell me what these hundreds of requests could do?
  - Solvency 3y ago
    Track you, probably with a thousand layers of redundancy, tech bloat, and decades of mold.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    A lot of them appear to be that they've split their javascript into a gazillion files for whatever reason (I suppose because they have several MB of it). But someone or lots of people there did seem to get addicted to dynamic loading. Like I've got 100 or so friends, but my friends page loads them 8-16 at a time as I scroll. Just send all 100 and set the profile pictures to deferred fetch. It'd probably be smaller than the js they have to make it do "infinite" scroll. Similarly, after getting to the bottom of their "infinite" scroll, my friend feed (which is annoyingly hidden away) gives me... 15 items. Just send me all 15. It's like 1-2 kB worth of data. If you're going to end the scroll after a dozen items, why is it using infinite scroll?
bdd 3y ago
Yes. And that was 4 years ago. Must add that figure does NOT include static asset serving path.
scottlamb 3y ago
> Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?! That sounds totally plausible to me. Also keep in mind they didn't say what system this is. It's often true that 1 request to a frontend system becomes 1 each to 10 different backend services owned by different teams and then 20+ total to some database/storage layer many of them depend on. The qps at the bottom of the stack is in general a lot higher than the qps at the top, though with caching and static file requests and such this isn't a universal truth.
Thaxll 3y ago
We're close to 1 million servers, not 12 racks in a DC.
avery17 3y ago
Whats with people lately writing 10^6 instead of 1 million. Its not that big that we need exponents to get involved.
- rijx 3y ago
  Erosion of education makes basic scientific knowledge very trendy
- jcparkyn 3y ago
  - The comment is referring to a graph that used 10^6 on the vertical axis, which is a very common way to format graphs with large numbers (not just "lately"). It's also the default for a lot of plotting libraries. - 10^n is more compact than million/billion/etc, more consistent, easier to translate, and doesn't suffer from regional differences (e.g. "one billion" is a different number in Britain than in the US). I'm not saying it's clearly better than "million" in this specific case, but it's definitely not clearly worse.

Sounds plausible. There are probably many queries required to display a page and Facebook has 2 billion daily active users.

ipaddr 3y ago
This is how information slowly changes. The original numbers from facebook needed to be taken with a grain of salt. 2 billion a day raises it more. Facebook claims to have 2 billion accounts but no where near 2 billion unique accounts. I don't know what facebook calls an active user but it use to mean logged in once in the past 30 days.
- reissbaker 3y ago
  No, the person you're responding to was correct. Facebook has over 2 billion daily active users [1], and DAU refers to unique users who used the product in a day [2]. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d... 2: https://www.innertrends.com/blog/active-users-measuring-business-success-with-dau-wau-and-mau https://www.innertrends.com/blog/active-users-measuring-busi...
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    It's directly in the link you provided. "For example, an active user can be measured as a user that has logged back into her account to interact with the product in the last 30 days." Even the marketing material is designed to confuse.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      It should be their account not her account (or his). Who writes this garbage.
      - OrsonSmelles 3y ago
        Alternating or stochastically varying pronouns in your examples used to be a common way to make an effort at inclusive writing, usually preferred aesthetically to constructs like `his/her'. (The style before that was basically to use masculine pronouns for hypothetical people in every single case and deny that there was anything to question about that.) I think I agree that the modern semi-standard of using `they' for examples where gender is irrelevant or unknown is strictly better, but it's hard for me to summon a lot of contempt for someone who goes with a different/older habit.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      That's a monthly active user. A daily active user would be someone who logged into an account in the last day. Generally monthly active user count will be higher than daily active users, but for something like Facebook the difference is about 50% (which is what the second article linked is explaining, if you read more than just cherry-picking a line that matches your preconceptions) And yes, that's a claim that if each user is a separate person, >20% of the world's population interacts with Facebook at least minimally each day. You can add your own interpretation about how many of the accounts are bots or otherwise duplicates, but it's a staggering amount either way.
  - zilti 3y ago
    Heh. Gave me a chuckle, because DAU also means "Dümmster Anzunehmender User" in German (dumbest assumed user, in context of creating idiot-proof software, and a wordplay on GAU, which means grösster anzunehmender Unfall, biggest assumed accident, which comes from fission power plants). And that kinda fits for the kind of people that perceivedly are left on the likes of Facebook and X.
- pests 3y ago
  Different metrics Daily vs Monthly Active User. MAU vs DAU

IncreasePosts 3y ago

I forgot how to count that low.

sonicanatidae 3y ago

Yeah, they allocated ALL of the ram to their DB servers. lol

storyinmemo 3y ago

I think about 10 years ago when I was working there I checked the trace to load my own homepage. Just one page, just for myself, and there were 100,000 data fetches.

vaylian 3y ago
By "homepage" you mean your Facebook profile?

gaogao 3y ago

Those queries are probably mostly memcache hits, though of course with distributed cache invalidation and consistency fun

ipaddr 3y ago
If it doesn't hit the database is it really a query?
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
  Why wouldn't it be?

bagels 3y ago

I can't comment on the numbers, but think of how many engineers work there and how many users Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram have. Each engineer is adding new features and queries every day. You're going to get a lot of queries.

bee_rider 3y ago
We’ve really wasted an incredible amount of talent-hours over last couple decades. Imagine if we’d worked on, like, climate change or something instead of ad platforms.
- esafak 3y ago
  "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher (2011); early Facebook employee, and Cloudera cofounder. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/quote-ad-generation/349689/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/quote...
- baby 3y ago
  You make it sound like everybody at Meta works in the ads department.
  - Scubabear68 3y ago
    They all do.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    98% of Meta's revenue is from ads. Meta is an ads department.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    It is an ad company, everyone there works on ads or indirectly works on making a platform for ads. The only exception is people who’ve managed to sneak their way into positions where they don’t contribute anything to the company. Those people are doing society a favor by wasting Facebook’s money.

reissbaker 3y ago

A custom JIT + language + web framework + DB + queues + orchestrator + hardware built to your precise specifications + DCs all over the world go a long way ;)

AlienRobot 3y ago

iirc Facebook has 3 billion users, so that sounds plausible.

ndriscoll 3y ago

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough money to make them extremely profitable despite it.

golergka 3y ago
Wasn't the whole point of GraphQL in mitigating this?
- serial_dev 3y ago
  Yeah, that's why you have only 100 requests* when you hover over an item instead of 800. (* allegedly, didn't verify it myself)
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  No. Here is the thing, hypermedia is cacheable. React/Graphql not so much. Facebook is now just an application that runs in the browser. As a poor, small developer who doesn't want to hemorrhage money, I tend to want things to be more hypermedia and less app. It saves on complexity and bandwidth and costs.
yodsanklai 3y ago
Could someone tell me what these hundreds of requests could do?
- Solvency 3y ago
  Track you, probably with a thousand layers of redundancy, tech bloat, and decades of mold.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  A lot of them appear to be that they've split their javascript into a gazillion files for whatever reason (I suppose because they have several MB of it). But someone or lots of people there did seem to get addicted to dynamic loading. Like I've got 100 or so friends, but my friends page loads them 8-16 at a time as I scroll. Just send all 100 and set the profile pictures to deferred fetch. It'd probably be smaller than the js they have to make it do "infinite" scroll. Similarly, after getting to the bottom of their "infinite" scroll, my friend feed (which is annoyingly hidden away) gives me... 15 items. Just send me all 15. It's like 1-2 kB worth of data. If you're going to end the scroll after a dozen items, why is it using infinite scroll?

bdd 3y ago

Yes. And that was 4 years ago. Must add that figure does NOT include static asset serving path.

scottlamb 3y ago

> Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?! That sounds totally plausible to me. Also keep in mind they didn't say what system this is. It's often true that 1 request to a frontend system becomes 1 each to 10 different backend services owned by different teams and then 20+ total to some database/storage layer many of them depend on. The qps at the bottom of the stack is in general a lot higher than the qps at the top, though with caching and static file requests and such this isn't a universal truth.

Thaxll 3y ago

We're close to 1 million servers, not 12 racks in a DC.

avery17 3y ago

Whats with people lately writing 10^6 instead of 1 million. Its not that big that we need exponents to get involved.

rijx 3y ago
Erosion of education makes basic scientific knowledge very trendy
jcparkyn 3y ago
- The comment is referring to a graph that used 10^6 on the vertical axis, which is a very common way to format graphs with large numbers (not just "lately"). It's also the default for a lot of plotting libraries. - 10^n is more compact than million/billion/etc, more consistent, easier to translate, and doesn't suffer from regional differences (e.g. "one billion" is a different number in Britain than in the US). I'm not saying it's clearly better than "million" in this specific case, but it's definitely not clearly worse.