Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost Overnight

Re:Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost O... by keating on Thursday May 15, 2008 @01:14AM (#190271)

The only reason this is considered impressive is because so many other services have set the bar so low. This isn't rocket science, it just requires thinking ahead and designing for scale.

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Re:Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost O... by neilk on Thursday May 15, 2008 @01:40AM (#190280)

What you would call rocket science? This is pretty impressive.

Erlang does a lot of the heavy lifting but even if it did everything out of the box (and it didn't), gluing it all together is no small feat.

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Re:Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost O... by keating on Thursday May 15, 2008 @02:32AM (#190313)

A chat server? Yawn. And it's not for 70 million people at once, that's user base, not simultaneous logins.

AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, SameTime, XMPP, Yahoo, this is a solved problem.

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Re:Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost O... by ggrot on Thursday May 15, 2008 @10:10AM (#190493)

Agreed. I find it ironic since a piece like this is likely written at least partially in an effort to attract programmers to facebook. To me it reads: "Come work for facebook and re-invent online chat. Again." Now, if the article had been about how they pushed the state of the art, I would be pretty interested, but none of this not new technology.

As for the dark launch thing, it is a fancy trick, but there are ways of doing load testing in an automated system by having test servers simulate the load from real users. This usually can give you much better data without wasting bandwidth, slowing down users' experiences, etc.

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Re:Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost O... by aston on Thursday May 15, 2008 @03:36AM (#190337)

Not to mention many of those services do have 70 million people on at once.

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Re:Scaling Facebook Chat to 70 Million Active Users Almost O... by posborne on Thursday May 15, 2008 @02:25PM (#190743)

Yes, it has been done before... But I don't think it has been done in an environment where you need to scale up quickly.

They had a problem, they solved it in a very cool fashion using the best tool for the job (Erlang), they thought of a very good way of testing the application, and they were gracious enough to share their experiences with us, other developers...

Seems like a win all around, so I'm not going to complain.

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