Facebook has more than 350 million active users. Digest that for a second. Can you imagine how many servers would be required working in a distributed fashion with redundancy to handle 350 million users? Well to answer my own question, Facebook has more than 30,000 servers and adds about 10,000 new servers every 18 months. Even more staggering, Facebook manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging data. Can you imagine backing up that much data?

With 350+ million users, squeezing every CPU cycle, optimizing every byte read and written, optimizing every line of code, and making sure to use the latest & fastest RAM is critical. Benchmarking is definitely key here. Well, Om Malik @Gigaom has a fascinating article today on how Facebook squeezes the most from their servers by using a home-grown proprietary benchmarking utility called Dyno. Definitely worth a read.