Facebook Scales Even Larger with Memcached

Great post on how Facebook continues to scale large with the help of memcached.

Since we’ve made all these changes, we have been able to scale memcached to handle 200,000 UDP requests per second with an average latency of 173 microseconds. The total throughput achieved is 300,000 UDP requests/s, but the latency at that request rate is too high to be useful in our system. This is an amazing increase from 50,000 UDP requests/s using the stock version of Linux and memcached.


We’re hoping to get our changes integrated into the official memcached repository soon, but until that happens, we’ve decided to release all our changes to memcached on github.

Good analysis in this post at HighScalability.com also.

top3Clicks Hits a Triple

We knew it was just a matter of time and sure enough, it happened.

We've been steadily increasing our advertising presence on Facebook for the BaconMarathon top3Clicks application. Mike has been busy creating some killer ads that we're tracking metrics on like crazy. Running a new, particularly inspired ad campaign with "Dark Knight", we encountered the much sought-after "triple loop":

* User 'a' clicks on the "Dark Knight" Facebook ad and adds the top3Clicks application

* User 'a' invites User 'b' to try out the application via our "TellaFriend" link   

* User 'b' tries out the application and User 'c' seeing this in their News Feed, adds the application.

One ad, one cpc, 3 users: friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.

Top3Clicks – Adding YouTube as an Igniter to drive return visits

We''ve been super busy over at the BaconMarathon Labs lately. Mike has put up the second of three posts, this time detailing our efforts to drive return visits to the app on Facebook.

 

Experimenting with Facebook ads has driven some quality traffic to Top3Clicks. We then turned our attention to driving repeat traffic via a concept we call "Igniters". Mike details one such implementation we did via YouTube.

The Clash - Live At Shea Stadium

(cross-posted at the BaconMarathon blog)

If you are like me and a fan of The Only Band That Matters (The Clash), you might know that the surviving members just released a stellar live show that was recorded weeks before their demise.

Live At Shea Stadium was recorded on the Combat Rock tour when The Clash was opening for The Who. Overall, the band, sound quality and song selection is top notch.

 

I also picked up the latest DVD, Live Revolution Rock,

which features the band over several years in a number of venues -- *and* I also ordered the forthcoming book, "The Clash", written by the band.

I wasn't aware that Live At Shea Stadium was forthcoming, I actually learned about it via Top3Clicks, watching The Clash, which was really motivating. The latest feature (news feed integration) was written listening to the Shea Stadium gig and the DVD.

The NFL Streams

The NFL season begins tonight (9/4/2008) with the Giants taking on the Redskins.

What’s so special about that you ask? Well, unlike NBC with the Olympics, the NFL is streaming the entire game LIVE on the web (first time ever). This will be interesting to see how it unfolds – is there a solid revenue model behind streaming? If so, what does it mean for broadcasters/cable?