Facebook (
) might be known as the world’s biggest social network, but it’s also an enormous photo sharing site. The latest numbers the company has shared with us include 15 billion photos uploaded in total, an average of 220 million new pictures posted each week, and at its busiest, 550,000 images being loaded each second.
In the past month or so, a small team at Facebook has quietly rolled out a new infrastructure – dubbed Haystack - for supporting this massive storage and bandwidth hog. According to the engineers behind it, Haystack represents a 3x performance improvement for Facebook, translating into “substantial” cost savings and more efficient photo loading for users.
Without getting into all of the technical details (Facebook’s engineering blog has an extensive description), the basic change behind the scenes is that a single server now has a lot more capacity for serving and storing photos. With Facebook reportedly spending a ton of money on hardware, that could be big news for the company’s bottom line.
One interesting tidbit for Facebook users that I learned while talking with the engineers behind the project - Doug Beaver, Peter Vaigel, and Jason Sobel – is that when you load a photo from within an album, Facebook actually pre-loads the 3 photos to the right and the left of the one you’re looking at. This is what makes the experience of clicking “previous” and “next” almost instantaneous. I always assumed something like this was the case, but actually reading all the details is fairly interesting - if you’re into that sort of thing.
