Everyone knows that they are big. Like Friendster, Youtube!, Flickr!, Fotolog, and Wikipedia, the only word that we know of that will allow us to wrap our minds around their enormous infrastructure - is BIG.

At a recent MySQL conference, titled “Scaling MySQL - Up or Out”, Facebook revealed that they are currently operating 10,000 web servers and 1,800 database servers. Another newsworthy thing to note is the deployment size of Memcached services - which is slated at roughly 800, as stated in the extensive report. In addition, James Hamilton pointed out of a slightly old report that puts that number at above 200 in H2 2007.

As mentioned by James Hamilton:

The Facebook fleet has grown fairly dramatically of late. For example, Facebook is the largest Memcached installation and the most recent reports I had come across have 200 Memcached servers at facebook. At the Scaling MySQL panel, they report 805 Memcached servers.

Insane!