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In the past month or so, a small team at Facebook has quietly rolled out a new infrastructure – dubbed Haystack - for supporting this massive storage and bandwidth hog. According to the engineers behind it, Haystack represents a 3x performance improvement for Facebook, translating into “substantial” cost savings and more efficient photo loading for users.
Without getting into all of the technical details (Facebook’s engineering blog has an extensive description), the basic change behind the scenes is that a single server now has a lot more capacity for serving and storing photos. With Facebook reportedly spending a ton of money on hardware, that could be big news for the company’s bottom line.