What version control system do you use, or is it a secret? Perforce? Git? I've seen Linus's talk that he gave about Git at the GooglePlex so perhaps you use Git. If so, how have you not run into Facebook's scaling issues?
The long answer is that we run perforce with a bunch of caching servers and custom stuff in front of it and some special client wrappers. In fact there is more than one client wrapper. One of them uses git to manage a local thin client of the relevant section of the repo and sends the changes to perforce. This is the one I typically use since I get the nice tooling of git for my daily coding and then I can package all the changes up into a single perforce change later.
Google has invested a lot of infrastructure into code management and tooling to make one repo work. We've reaped a number of benefits as a result.
As others have mentioned though there are trade offs. We made the tradeoff that best suited our needs.
It would be great if someone used that to write a high performance git server.
Could they?
We actually have an open source tool that allows you carve off parts of your Perforce server as Git repos. The repos can overlap in Perforce allowing you to share code seamlessly between different Git repos. You can generate new repos from existing code easily and can even generate shallow git repos that are usage for development.
Details are at: http://www.perforce.com/product/components/git-fusion
I'm happy to answer questions here or on Twitter: @p4mataway
http://www.perforce.com/blog/110607/how-do-they-do-it-google...
The story i got from a Googler was that there are many separate projects in a single repository (which is normal for Perforce), and dependencies are handled by making your libraries subprojects (or whatever they're called - like subrepos in Git, essentially symlinks), rather than using an artifact-centred approach.