I have been scrounging for articles/info about the architecture at Facebook, the challenges & ways they tackle them. What they use & why they use. How do they scale & 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.
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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"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.
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:
Source: Stackoverflow.com