Technology Review has an eye-opening article on the muscle behind Google's processing firepower. While it's primary intent is towards a comparison between Google's distributed network architecture and that of Akamai, the numbers at play are sometimes just too intense to believe. Read on..
- 150 million queries/day
- 1,000 queries/sec (peak)
- 10,000+ servers
- More than 4 tera-ops/sec at daily peak
- Index: 3 billion Web pages
- 4 billion total docs
- 4+ petabytes disk storage
While the above (atleast a) year old figures can be jaw dropping, they were considered to be on the outrageously understated end of the scale : some of those figures are said to be off by a factor of 10. The article goes on to talk about GMail and the possible reasons behind Google's apparent secrecy when it comes to releasing statistics.
The TR article can be viewed here. A few amusing images of Google in 1996 can be seen here and here :)
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