Have you considered that your opinion on the best way to serve data to a billion users might actually be wrong? That maybe Facebook actually knows what they are doing?
Not really surprising, from what I’ve heard from friends about their cowboy-style internal engineering culture, and spaghetti piled on spaghetti internal code organization, where shipping new features ASAP is privileged above all other goals.
When you have endless money to throw engineers and servers at a problem, it’s possible to kinda sorta paper over a lot of horrible broken design. Not sure whether that implies anything one way or another about whether or not they “know what they are doing”.
It sort of depends on your definition of “know”. After all, their motto is “move fast and break things.”
Certainly! But I've also done work where Humvees in the middle of Iraq use satellite internet connectivity with massive latency and the more connections it has to open to get started the slower everything gets.
Perhaps this is an advantage where latency is low so you can load parts of the page faster but I'd love to know some of the more technical reasons behind this!
[1] http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...