In my last post I wrote
Big numbers are of no practical use. They are mental popcorn, in the end unfulfilling.
Unfortunately I kind of like popcorn, especially when it comes in big packages. So naturally when I read Nicholas Carr’s blog about the amount of images on Facebook I realised that this mental popcorn was too good not to share. So dig in.
Facebook has announced that it now stores 10 billion photographs uploaded by its members (as noted by Data Center Knowledge). Moreover, since it stores each photo in four different sizes, it actually has 40 billion image files in its system. More than 15 billion photos are viewed at the site everyday, and at times of peak demand 300,000 images are viewed every second.
That is a seriously big bucket of popcorn…