Facebook has, in the last six months, managed to double in speed, and there’s a very interesting post from the guys at Facebook to explain just how they’ve managed to improve so very much over so short a time.

Fair play to the folks at Facebook for keeping everything moving without needing their own Fail Wail

The post to Facebook’s Engineering Notes page does a fairly solid job of describing the areas in which Facebook felt it needed to improve and the manner in which it picked up speed over the last six months. Since June of 2009, Facebook has managed to become twice as fast, so you can imagine there’s been some considerable improvements, especially given the fact that the social network’s user base has been growing steadily.

Facebook’s aim was to improve its network time, which is defines as the length of time |a user is waiting while data is transmitted between their computer and facebook. As the blog post notes, that’s not something that Facebook can control, given variable connection speed, but it can reduce the amount of data being sent around in an effort to minimise headaches related to network time.

Similarly, there was an effort made to kill off some of the generation time, which is described as the length of time it takes from Facebook’s web server receiving a request to the time it sends back a response. Facebook admits that that one is “totally under our control and is accomplished through cleaner, faster code and constantly improving our backend architectures.”

The last thing to improve upon was Facebook’s render time, which, fairly obviously, describes the literal amount of time it takes for a browser to mull over Facebook’s responses and sort you out with a page to view. This one is always going to vary based on users’ machines and connections, but it’s as much up to Facebook to cut down on the amount of data moving back and forth as anything else.

It’s certainly an interesting post, and one that goes into a fair bit of detail on just how Facebook has managed to cut down on excessive load times despite its 130 odd million visitors in the US alone last month.