Facebook’s Mobile Device Testing Lab
Frederic Lardinois (via Peter Steinberger):
The mobile device lab currently occupies 60 racks in the data center. Each rack holds 32 phones, for a total of almost 2,000 devices, but, as Facebook’s Antoine Reversat told us, the plan is to bring this number to 64 devices per rack.
Each rack features its own Wi-Fi signal and is also an EMI enclosure to make sure that neighboring racks can’t pick up the Wi-Fi signals from its neighbors.
Every time an engineer makes changes to one of Facebook’s main mobile apps, that new version of the app is automatically tested on these devices to ensure that there are no crashes or performance issues.
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All of the phones also need to be connected to a PC or Mac in order to receive the latest code. Because of this, there are PCs and Mac Mini’s under every rack. Facebook uses eight Mac Minis per rack for iOS testing (because each one can only talk to four iPhones) or four OCP Leopard servers for testing Android devices.
