Facebook Estimated to Be Running 180,900 Servers
How many servers does it take to run Facebook? A new estimate puts the company's server base at roughly 180,000 units.
There is no information on the exact count, but some use Facebook's disclosed power consumption of its data centers for a guideline. According to the company, it consumes about 509 million kilowatt hours annually, while the data center power usage is estimated to be about 58 megawatts. Combined with Facebook’s published Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.07, the company conclusively sends 54.27 megawatts to its servers. At 300 watts per server, that would mean about 180,900 servers, according to James Hamilton. If Facebook can achieve the generally assumed 250 watt estimate for Google, the company may run as many as 217,080 servers.
The growth in server numbers is stunning. Hamilton said that the company may have run just 30,000 servers in October 2009, and 60,000 in June of 2010. He also reminded us that Google's datacenters consume a total of 260 megawatts. With a PUE of 1.14, the company provides 228 megawatts to their servers, which would translate to about 1,040,000 servers at the estimated average power consumption of 250 watts per server.

Honestly, it's a mess.
Honestly, it's a mess.
Nuts! -- via
One person I know has like 700 pictures in total...
And don't forget the Homeland Security, and the CIA. There's been some speculation that the CIA had a role in funding Facebook.
Lets break it down..
Cooling. At least 33% of that quoted data center figure is probably cooling.
Switching is at least 3%
So there goes 36% of the power, if directly translated from the server count of 180,900, it leaves us with
121,203. Fairly significant reduction. And some of that has to be storage only devices, which SHOULD account for a lions share of the power consumption. However, this would depend greatly on the methodology used in creating the data center, as there are many ways to do it that would require more or less storage only devices. If, for some reason -- They decided to take the approach of purely distributed, most redundant, most expensive solution and use no SAN, and rely on direct attached storage per server, minimizing the loss of data per failure point (which is likely mirrored at this point), given the amount of users, and the, in the words of Chef from south park "Ridiculous load of pig crap", each user brings with them, I could easily see the total server count for FB being 121K using the methodology described above. If they use any SAN, it should be significantly reduced.
Guessing wildly here, but I'll take a stab at it. Text heavy articles aren't going to require multiple servers to store. I'm guessing tom's gets a fairly large amount of traffic, so we're going to need to load balance things, which is going to require a few redundant servers and some extra ones to do the balancing. Finally, you're going to want to put servers in the country they're serving to improve response times.
So, by SWAG, I'd say 4-6 servers per localization (probably several more on the US and UK sites, fewer on smaller ones like Turkey), or a few dozen total.
Did you mean lazy or stupid?