Millions of items are traded each day on Ebay.com and some 1.3 million people make all or part of their living selling on eBay. But wait, there're lot more interesting details about eBay traffic and storage infrastructure as was revealed by Paul Strong of Ebay to Chris Preimesberger of eWEEK. Some highlights:
1. eBay maintains four copies of most of its databases.
2. It takes 30 minutes to build the ebay.com site - in the last 2.5 years, there have been 2 million builds.
3. On an average, eBay.com runs into issues for about 50 seconds per day.
4. The site averages more than 1 billion page views per day.
5. Users trade about $1,700 worth of goods on the site every second.
6. The site currently has about 600 million listings and about 204 million registered users.
7. The world's time zones provide a kind of natural load-balancer. When there's surge in traffic from US, that's generally when Europe [the second-largest region using eBay] is asleep - and vice versa.
8. eBay engineers have to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions.
Source: How eBay Manages Its Storage [eweek.com]