The project was discontinued back in 2013 and then replaced by HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine).įacebook dropped the long-standing PHP support in HHVM version 4.0 in response to PHP7’s higher performance upstream interpreter. This has allowed Facebook to get much more out of its web servers since Facebook relies heavily on PHP to serve content.Ī small team of engineers (initially just three of them) at Facebook spent 18 months developing HipHop, and it was used for a few years. HipHop converts PHP into C++ code which can then be compiled for better performance. PHP, being a scripting language, is relatively slow when compared to code that runs natively on a server. HipHop for PHP and HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) It is likely the world’s largest Memcached installation handling billions of requests per second. Through the years, Facebook has made a ton of optimizations to Memcached and the surrounding software (like optimizing the network stack).įacebook runs thousands of Memcached servers with tens of terabytes of cached data at any one point in time. It’s a distributed memory caching system that Facebook (and a ton of other sites) uses as a caching layer between the web servers and MySQL servers (since database access is relatively slow). Memcached is by now one of the most famous pieces of software on the internet. Let’s present (some of) the software that Facebook uses to provide us all with the world’s largest social network site. Then there are the custom-written systems, like Haystack, a highly scalable object store used to serve Facebook’s immense amount of photos, or Scribe, a logging system that can operate at Facebook’s scale (which is far from trivial).īut enough of that. 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). Facebook uses Linux but has optimized it for its own purposes (especially in terms of network throughput).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.In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of) which refers to services using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones. One interesting fact is that even at this enormous scale, Facebook (Meta) data centers are supported by 100% renewable energy.Ĭheck out this blog post to learn more stats on the most used social media platforms. In 2021, Facebook had 40 million square feet of data center space among its 18 campuses around the globe that host millions of servers.
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