How does the server of Msn or Yahoo keep up with the extreme high volume of traffic?
1. There are constantly thousands of uploading / downloading requests. You dont need a phd to figure out that it would require a lot of bandwidth and Disk space.
– how many people, on average, are actually making download requests and upload requests on a second basis?
2. Where and which company provide the hardware such as hard disks and bandwidth to Yahoo for its services. For example, the following services require a lot of disk space and bandwidth:
1 billion email accounts of 2Gb in disk space, 100000 people uploading attachment to emails, 100000 yahoo business webhosting client sites servicing 1000 page requests/per site.
That was such an interesting question, I decided to do some digging. First of all, I apologize, I focused on Google, rather than Yahoo or MSN, since Google is far, far, larger. (It’s that world’s largest search engine/map site/email service/etc by search volume)
Each of those companies builds huge server farms, as they’re called. [See my first link]
Google needs special server farms to "handle 2.7 billion online searches a month."
It turns out,
"The Times gives the latest estimate of how many servers Google is currently operating at its 25 locations around the world: about 450,000.
That figure has more than quadrupled since 2004, when Google’s server operation was already estimated to be one of the world’s most powerful distributed supercomputers. "
That’s just amazing! Another interesting fact:
The United States, has altogether "Nine million servers"
and with respect to Google, their
electricity usage alone "somewhere between $50-million and $100-million every year — and growing."
Every penny paid for by the company’s online advertising.
Remarkable.
