eBay: Scaling for 212 Million Users

How do you scale a web architecture to handle 212 million registered users and traffic averaging 1 billion page views per day? That's the task faced by the web architects at eBay, who fine tune a personalized database-driven e-commerce site that manages $1,590 in transactions per second. eBay's Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett recently gave a presentation at SD Forum 2006 on scaling this massive operation, titled The eBay Architecture (link via Greg Linden). The talk walks through the history of eBay's architecture, and provides details on the current version of the site - which spans more than 15,000 instances across eight data centers - and how it handles the scaling of databases, applications and search. eBay says it stores more than 2 petabytes of data, and that its global web platform handles 3 billion API calls and 26 billion SQL executions every day.

Findory's Greg Linden calls the presentation "a very interesting talk for anyone who is working or wants to work on big websites and big data," and offers an additional endoresement from Tim Bray said, "This ought to be required reading for everyone in this business whose title contains the words 'Web' or 'Architect.' "