Facebook Architecture

Question

I have been scrounging for articles info about the architecture at Facebook  the challenges  amp  ways they tackle them  What they use  amp  why they use  How do they scale  amp  what are the design decisions for what they do etc  Main underpinning being to learn  Knowing about sites which handles such massive traffic gives lots of pointers for architects etc  to keep in mind certain stuff while designing new sites  I am sharing what I found   Facebook Science  amp  Social Graph  Video  Scale at Facebook Facebook Chat Architecture Facebook Blog Facebook Cassandra Architecture and Design Facebook Engineering Notes Quora - Facebook Architecture Facebook for 600M users Hadoop  amp  its usage at Facebook Erlang at Facebook  Chat Architecture Facebook Performance Caching Evolution Facebook Connect Login Architecture  I have 2 more links but unable to post due to restrictions at this site  Also  please share if anyone has anything better  need not be related to Facebook only   P S  - I wasn t able to find good places to share this research  hence this initiative  Hope this helps someone

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Facebook is using LAMP structure  Facebook   s back-end services are written in a variety of different programming languages including C    Java  Python  and Erlang and they are used according to requirement  With LAMP Facebook uses some technologies  to support large number of requests  like   Memcache - It is a memory caching system that is used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites  like Facebook  by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce reading time  Memcache is Facebook   s primary form of caching and helps alleviate the database load  Having a caching system allows Facebook to be as fast as it is at recalling your data  Thrift  protocol  - It is a lightweight remote procedure call framework for scalable cross-language services development  Thrift supports C    PHP  Python  Perl  Java  Ruby  Erlang  and others  Cassandra  database  - It is a database management system designed to handle large amounts of data spread out across many servers  HipHop for PHP - It is a source code transformer for PHP script code and was created to save server resources  HipHop transforms PHP source code into optimized C    After doing this  it uses g   to compile it to machine code    If we go into more detail  then answer to this question go longer  We can understand more from following posts    How Does Facebook Work   Data Management  Facebook-style Facebook database design  Facebook wall  39 s database structure Facebook  quot like quot  data structure

User · Answer

Knowing about sites which handles   such massive traffic gives lots of   pointers for architects etc  to keep   in mind certain stuff while designing   new sites    I think you can probably learn a lot from the design of Facebook  just as you can from the design of any successful large software system  However  it seems to me that you should not keep the current design of Facebook in mind when designing new systems   Why do you want to be able to handle the traffic that Facebook has to handle  Odds are that you will never have to  no matter how talented a programmer you may be  Facebook itself was not designed from the start for such massive scalability  which is perhaps the most important lesson to learn from it   If you want to learn about a non-trivial software system I can recommend the book  Dissecting a C  Application  about the development of the SharpDevelop IDE  It is out of print  but it is available for free online  The book gives you a glimpse into a real application and provides insights about IDEs which are useful for a programmer

User · Answer

Well Facebook has undergone MANY many changes and it wasn t originally designed to be efficient  It was designed to do it s job  I have absolutely no idea what the code looks like and you probably won t find much info about it  for obvious security and copyright reasons   but just take a look at the API  Look at how often it changes and how much of it doesn t work properly  anymore  or at all   I think the biggest ace up their sleeve is the Hiphop   http   developers facebook com blog post 358 You can use HipHop yourself  https   github com facebook hiphop-php wiki  But if you ask me it s a very ambitious and probably time wasting task  Hiphop only supports so much  it can t simply convert everything to C    So what does this tell us  Well  it tells us that Facebook is NOT fully taking advantage of the PHP language  It s not using the latest 5 3 and I m willing to bet there s still a lot that is PHP 4 compatible  Otherwise  they couldn t use HipHop  HipHop IS A GOOD IDEA and needs to grow and expand  but in it s current state it s not really useful for that many people who are building NEW PHP apps   There s also PHP to JAVA via things like Resin Quercus  Again  it doesn t support everything     Another thing to note is that if you use any non-standard PHP module  you aren t going to be able to convert that code to C   or Java either  However   Let s take a look at PHP modules  They are ARE compiled in C    So if you can build PHP modules that do things  like parse XML  etc   then you are basically  minus some interaction  working at the same speed  Of course you can t just make a PHP module for every possible need and your entire app because you would have to recompile and it would be much more difficult to code  etc   However   There are some handy PHP modules that can help with speed concerns  Though at the end of the day  we have this awesome thing known as  the cloud  and with it  we can scale our applications  PHP included  so it doesn t matter as much anymore  Hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper  Amazon just lowered it s prices  again  speaking of   So as long as you code your PHP app around the idea that it will need to one day scale   Then I think you re fine and I m not really sure I d even look at Facebook and what they did because when they did it  it was a completely different world and now trying to hold up that infrastructure and maintain it   Well  you get things like HipHop    Now how is HipHop going to help you  It won t  It can t  You re starting fresh  you can use PHP 5 3  I d highly recommend looking into PHP 5 3 frameworks and all the new benefits that PHP 5 3 brings to the table along with the SPL libraries and also think about your database too  You re most likely serving up content from a database  so check out MongoDB and other types of databases that are schema-less and document-oriented  They are much much faster and better for the most  common  type of web site app    Look at NEW companies like Foursquare and Smugmug and some other companies that are utilizing NEW technology and HOW they are using it  For as successful as Facebook is  I honestly would not look at them for  how  to build an efficient web site app  I m not saying they don t have very  very  talented people that work there that are solving  their  problems creatively   I m also not saying that Facebook isn t a great idea in general and that it s not successful and that you shouldn t get ideas from it    I m just saying that if you could view their entire source code  you probably wouldn t benefit from it

[facebook] Facebook Architecture

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