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wow. they have no (ie random) partitioning - it's just brute force. i hope their "Graph-based caching and storage systems" is coming along... :o)

[edit: although, given the exponential growth they give and the factor of 4 headroom they have left, they're going to top out in about 1.5 years anyway]

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Yep, so basically one request can touch hundreds of servers. It's basically the opposite approach of Twitter. They aggregate the graphs on write.

Who is "They" in this case? Both a read and a write could be a "request", so I am having some trouble with the ambiguity of your last sentence. Thanks!

Twitter is they.

Which also is the reason you can only have 5000 friends on FB. If you had a million friends, you'd probably touch all their servers for one request.

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