[7532yahoogmail]

According to Stanford prof who launched ramcloud Facebook indeed uses MySQL. But MySQL by itself was hopelessly slow. That's why Facebook has over 4000 memcache servers (this as of 2009). By the time you add ram underlying disks he estimated 75pct of all Facebook data is cached in memory. That's why it works.

[johannes1234321]

Instead of Stanford as source here is an example from the FB engineering blog about migrating from HBase to MySQl for messaged in order to reach performance: https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/migrating-messenger-sto...

And yes, they certainly cache data in multiple layers using different technologies but from all I as an outsider can see MySQL still seems to be their source of truth for most services. Meaning all writes go to MySQL and at least when going deep in history or doing searches (which typically can't be served from a cache) hit MySQL.

[no-s]

memcached + rdbms is really super cheap and effective. Properly architected it can be tolerant of all sorts of latency/failure/CAP issues, up to some limits of course.

there was a variant library that allowed you to replace memcached servers on the fly without worrying about the size of the cluster list or having to recache.