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Interesting use of the 20-second cookie. What happens when they scale to data centers in Europe, Asia, and South America? Does it become a arbitrary-second cookie depending on where the user is?

Nonetheless, I can appreciate how a simple approach solves the problem. If these are the most dramatic scaling issues that facebook faces, then this provides strong support to the argument that you shouldn't focus too much on scaling and optimization when first building your site. There are probably better uses of your early time.



I'd guess that they'd need to partition their data somehow by then, so the Europe DB is master for European users and slave for the rest, and so on.




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