LinkLog: Web Scale Computing at Facebook

Facebook is the largest site in the world. Some of the statistics are staggering. Please take a look at this article on Facebook use and customization of open source to scale.

  • Facebook still uses PHP, but it has built a compiler for it so it can be turned into native code on its web servers, thus boosting performance.
  • Facebook uses Linux, but has optimized it for its own purposes (especially in terms of network throughput).
  • Facebook uses MySQL, but primarily as a key-value persistent storage, moving joins and logic onto the web servers since optimizations are easier to perform there (on the “other side” of the Memcached layer).

If you have a bit more time to explore, you may also want to take a look at this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008.

Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe.

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