Segmenting by School Solved Friendster's Server-Crashing n-Squared Problem
Ben Gilbert · Meta (Audio) · Acquired · Oct 28, 2024 · at 1:01:32
Acquired co-host Ben Gilbert analyzes why Facebook's early technical architecture succeeded where Friendster suffered massive performance degradation.
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“Friendsters out there trying to compute second degree friends of friends, which is this crazy hard computer science problem, especially as the global number of people growing, it's an n squared problem. And Facebook is over here, or the Facebook at the time, in the land where they're keeping n small. So even anything that's n squared is contained within that school, and their servers aren't falling over and taking twenty-plus seconds to load pages the way that the friendsters of the world are.”
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