Why Facebook is so slow
I have just read a blog post which comments about the average time it takes to load a page on various social networking sites.
Regarding Facebook it says: “despite its popularity amongst users, the network took the longest to load up.”
Now, I’m not an American teenager, but … well duh!
I think the sentence should be converted to “due to its popularity amongst users, the network took the longest to load up.”
The post also mentions that Faceparty is one of the fastest loading social networks - this is not so surprising if you consider that it was the first social networking site to have mass appeal back in 2000 or so.
Anyone can build a social networking site. The biggest problem with them is to handle the load on the servers when they explode in popularity.
Q. If Google can present a zillion search results in milliseconds, why does Facebook take so long to display a pretty profile?
A. Both search engines and social networking sites have intense load from users’ demanding information retrieval. However, unlike search engines, social networks have the added pressure of users expecting high speed updates of information. Updating information is more intensive than reading information - hence Mark Pors, chief technical officer at WatchMouse, should not be so surprised by the slowness of these social networks.
Related posts:
Building a Facebook Application
January 29th, 2008 at 1:57 am
you dont know much do you?
the reason facebook is so slow has nothing at all to do with the load on the servers, the reason its so slow is the fact that the applications that runs on it are coded terrible, and completly hammer your browser using more ram and more cpu cycles…
load a freshly made profile on facebook, it will load in miliseconds, load a popular persons profile, who has lots of friends and lots os stupid applications installed on there profile, it will take for ever to load.. but while your waiting, hit ctrl alt and del and check out how much cpu and ram usage your browsers executable file (firefox.exe or iexplorer.exe) is using.. 100%
you know nothing about web servers
March 9th, 2008 at 2:32 am
I know more than the average person about web servers. But, I admit there is a lot that i don’t know. If you are implying that updating information is not more intensive than reading information then I guess I know more than you about databases.
The number of applications on facebook could well be another reason why it runs slowly - so no argument with you there.
The main point of the post, therefore, still stands true - it is not very surprising that facebook is slow.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Its annoying either way, I would have thought that due to its high popularity the Facebook guys would have got themselves a few extra servers to handle the strain… that and regulated the stupid Apps that keep popping up… or maybe just get rid of the 3rd party ones?
May 26th, 2008 at 4:54 am
to annoyed user
You realize that most of the apps are 3rd party?
Have you ever looked at the list of apps that are not 3rd party?
It’s basically the few that are installed automatically when you make your account and about 20 more.
June 2nd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
why the hell did you compare facebook with google searching?
google has an index, facebook is another story.. it might have its own index, but it has to be a heavier index… google simply has URLs and sitemaps..
June 18th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Facebook runs pretty good for how many requests it gets per minute. I know my computer is stupid fast and my cpu will max out on one of the cores from certain profiles, *(Tara get rid of all that crap
) but that doesn’t mean anything when the status bar is “waiting for page” for about 30 seconds.
I do understand what is “working” in the background of facebook and if you want to see your computer do the same thing, open up a search and look for ever *.ini file on your computer while you open MSPAINT and do a bucket fill with red on a file that is 40000×30000 pixels and try to open up your documents folder, see how long that takes on your 1000 dollar machine and imagine facebook is doing millions of millions of things like that per second and still doing it well 24hrs a day for a growing interconnecting everchanging mass of people.
It’s great that we have these FREE services and no complain that there is a longer delay than usual. If you want to feel the real lag try dialing up to it
Wayne M
June 18th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Re:”why the hell did you compare facebook with google searching?”
I was pre-empting the question “If Google can present a zillion search results in milliseconds, why does Facebook take so long to display a pretty profile?”
Answer: Yes, facebook is another story completely