Re: Has Facebook fallen on its face?

[Scott Klement <pctech@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Facebook is struggling to keep up with the load placed upon it. 
Currently, there are around 200 million people using facebook.  Think 
about that number, for a moment.

To put this into perspective a little bit...  here's a list of the 
world's countries by population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

Facebook isn't a country, obviously.  But if it were, it'd be the 5th 
largest country in the world!  More than triple the size of the United 
Kingdom or France.  That's a LOT of people to try to handle at once.

That said, I'm not having the long delays you are having.  I sometimes 
have to wait 30 seconds for a click... but never anything near an hour. 
 I agree that hour delays would make a site completely unusable.

But they're constantly working to upgrade their systems to handle the loads.

Also, keep in mind that many of the applications on facebook are hosted 
by 3rd-parties.  So if you are having trouble with an app -- for 
example, if Mafia Wars is slow, it's probably not Facebook's fault, but 
rather Zynga (or whomever hosts the app you're struggling with.)



Booth Martin wrote:
> At least for me, lag times yesterday and today have been up to an hour, 
> and that seems unusable by any measure.