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[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #103] 8+ Billion Daily Views: How Facebook's Live Video Ranking Algorithm Works
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[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #103] 8+ Billion Daily Views: How Facebook's Live Video Ranking Algorithm Works

With detailed engineering explanation and flow chart....

Naina Chaturvedi's avatar
Naina Chaturvedi
Aug 17, 2025
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[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #103] 8+ Billion Daily Views: How Facebook's Live Video Ranking Algorithm Works
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Hi All,

Facebook's Live Video Ranking Algorithm is a tech marvel, capable of processing 8 billion daily views using Apache Storm for real-time stream processing and Memcached for high-speed caching. This sophisticated system forms the backbone of Facebook's live video experience, ensuring that users discover the most relevant and engaging live content in real-time.

In this post, I’ll dive deep into how this system works, exploring the key components, technologies, and processes that enable such massive-scale, low-latency live video ranking.


Learn how to System design —Design Lyft

[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #15] 80 Million Photos Daily : How Instagram Achieves Real Time Photo Sharing

[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #9] Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Marvel: How it Serves 2.9 Billion Daily Active Users Using PyTorch and Cassandra


System Overview 

Daily live video views: 8+ billion

Concurrent live streams: 100,000+ 

Peak viewers for a single stream: 5 million+ 

Live video sessions started per day: 50 million+ 

Average ranking latency: < 100ms 

Storm clusters: 50+ 

Storm workers: 100,000+ 

Memcached nodes: 500,000+ 

Features considered per video: 10,000+ 

ML models in production: 100+ 

Global data centers: 20+ 

Edge locations: 150+ 

System availability: 99.99% 


Learn system design pulses -

[System Design Pulse #1] Understanding Latency and Throughput: Critical Factors in System Design and Performance Tuning

[System Design Pulse #2] Striking the Right Balance: Optimizing Availability and Consistency in Distributed Architectures

[System Design Pulse #3] THE theorem of System Design and why you MUST know it - Brewer theorem

[System Design Pulse #4] How Distributed Message Queues Work?

[System Design Pulse #5] Breaking It Down: The Magic Behind Microservices Architecture

[System Design Pulse #6] Why Availability Patterns Are So Crucial in System Design?

[System Design Pulse #7] How Consistency Patterns helps Design Robust and Efficient Systems?

[System Design Pulse #8] Caching is Crucial : How Caching Slashes Latency and Supercharges Performance

[System Design Pulse #9] Why these Key Components are Crucial for System Design.


How it works —

1. Broadcaster initiates a live stream through the Facebook App or Website.

2. Live Video Ingestion Service receives and processes the incoming stream.

3. Transcoding Farm generates multiple quality versions of the stream.

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