Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook, recently gave a presentation entitled “High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook” to the University of California, San Diego. Jeff did a great job summarizing the challenges Facebook had to overcome. The following items I found of most importance:
- They are moving towards a PHP compiler that creates machine code and plan on gaining a 40% performance gain once it is complete.
- Even though MySQL is used exclusively for database storage, not a single JOIN is performed. Instead they do manipulations in the web/service tier and feed the cache.
- They average 250,000 cache requests per server
I was a little disappointed that Jeff did not talk about managing deployments and application releases, which is always tricky at large scale.
Direct Link To Video: http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/asx/JeffRothschildFacebook.asx
