Facebook Scaling Talk by Rothschild

I watched a presentation by Jeff Rothschild about how they scaled Facebook up to its current preposterous size.  There's a lot of interesting stuff about optimizing things in here and it was definitely worth putting on in the background when I was rotating passwords the other day.  I stopped it right as we was about to take Q & A, at the middle of the video.  Here are the things that were interesting enough that I jotted something down:

• They optimized image requests from involving 10 disk IOs to just 1.
• Scribe sounds interesting, a fault-tolerant read-write system. (used to handle syslog flood)
• You need to "operate in RAM speeds" for most internet interactions today.
• They have neato memcache tricks.  "It really is the core of the site."
• The "multiget hole" is an interesting problem.  Backup and listen when he gets to it.
• "Avoid shared architectures when possible."
• "Don't put data in a central database."
• Move fast; don't be afraid.

The "hackathon" is a really neat idea.  Apparently you get to think up some project that can't be anything that's been assigned to you.  If you donut have something in mind, you can help other teams.  Their last one was three days long, and from his description, some of the best features of the facebook site are the result of hackathon projects.  I could totally go for some of that, here.