Stonebraker explained to me that Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site's massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve.Over a year ago I read that FB had (at that time) 30,000 servers, and hosted more pix than all other sites combined. As the old saying goes, it's not that the dancing bear dances well, it's that he dances at all.
I didn’t know who to ping about this! So glad you were interested and I didn’t even reach out to you.