Social networks generate a million requests per second

The owner of the largest content delivery network, Akamai , reported that in its system traffic from social sites exceeded one million requests per second. The company serves a number of major social networks, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Metacafe, which in total generate 92% of all American traffic on social networks.

At the same time, traffic from sites that are not themselves social networks, but constitute related services, including widgets that can be integrated on Facebook, MySpace, etc., is growing at a very high rate. For example, Slide has a monthly audience of over 50 million unique users, a 500% increase in traffic per year. The most popular widgets are Slideshow, FunWall and Super Poke.

Another widget provider is RockYou (38 million users), which created a number of useful Facebook widgets, including a slideshow, brilliant text, voice mail, etc. About 180 million impressions of these widgets are recorded daily.

“Over the past year, many of these companies have not only experienced unexpected growth, but also noticeably improved the functionality of their sites by introducing various multimedia and interactive features,” said Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Media and Entertainment at Akamai. According to him, modern social services with tens and hundreds of millions of users can hardly function normally without the help of Akamai or another company that provides the content delivery infrastructure. Many social networks tried to independently serve users and build their own CDN network, but as their workload increased, they had to abandon this idea.
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via Akamai