How Facebook Runs Its LAMP Stack 111
prostoalex writes "At QCon San Francisco, Aditya Agarwal of Facebook described how his employer runs its software stack (video and slides). Facebook runs a typical LAMP setup where P stands for PHP with certain customizations, and back-end services that are written in C++ and Java. Facebook has released some of the infrastructure components into the open source community, including the Thrift RPC framework and Scribe distributed logging server."
A hodge podge mess (Score:1, Insightful)
As an architect, I decided to view the presentation so that I can learn new things about scalability and architecture. This presentation came across as very amateurish and lacks any serious technical depth.Facebook seems to be stitched together as a set of "solution de jour" technologies without any real architecture behind it. Too many languages, frameworks and other gems. These guys took the notion of the right language for the task to an extreme. I have to believe that code releases into production is a big challenge for these folks.
Re:whatever (Score:2, Insightful)
Whatever they're doing, it's not working too well. Sure, they manage to serve the pages, but the user experience is confusing and it seems to take them forever to roll out new and improved versions.
That has little to do with the infrastructure and more to do with the site design. Please don't blame the sys engineers/admins for the poor interface design.
Re:the blame is with management (Score:5, Insightful)
That has little to do with the infrastructure and more to do with the site design. Please don't blame the sys engineers/admins for the poor interface design.
Well, the fact that they gave a talk about their LAMP stack tells you that they consider engineering more important than site design. Furthermore, a poor choice of infrastructure makes doing good site design hard.
And that's my point: Facebook is evidently driven by system stuff and programmers, while it should be driven by site design.
Clearly, $MY_SPECIALTY should drive the entire system! They made a big mistake by allowing $OTHER_SPECIALTY to take precedence. Everyone knows that only $MY_SPECIALTY should dominate all design plans. Duh.
Re:the blame is with management (Score:5, Insightful)
If your site infrastructure is influencing how you design, you've made some sort of monolithic error along the way. Good code completely separates the content from the design. It's not like they've just hacked up a Wordpress install (which seems to go out of its way to tie content and design together) - Facebook employs hundreds if not now thousands of programmers; it's pretty safe to assume there's at least one UI/UX specialist on board as well.
All things considered, I'd actually say that Facebook's design is pretty decent, but that's of course a matter of opinion. A lot of the code that went into that design sucks, but that's what happens when you have to support IE6. Regardless, I think it's great that they're sharing knowledge about how they've managed to use and customize an infrastructure to support 200,000,000 users, especially with the amount of traffic they have to deal with. That's well beyond the scale that many governments have to worry about!
Re:Not very well (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that you can do massive improvements to PHP perf in the space of 5-10 minutes without a recompile right...? The idea that PHP is "slow" is FUDtastic. Of course it's slow if all you're doing is letting it interpret every time, but with APC or another caching mechanism it's interpret once, run-the-bytecode every other time. Massive speed improvements.
Re:Come on guys (Score:1, Insightful)
With slashdot, half the time clicking on a comment to expand it doesn't work unless I refresh several times or copy and paste the link into a new browser. [...] At first I thought this was because I still used IE and that was the problem, being that slashdot doesn't cater to IE users, fine. So after I switched to Chrome I figured it wouldn't be an issue, yet its not any different.
if you're using the index2.pl (beta) in anything other than Firefox you're clearly an idiot. they state the support for that browser and the fact that it's beta should be enough of a hint to stop whining
if you're using the classic index and are having any of these problems you're lying through your teeth because they dont exist.
either way, you're an idiot.
Re:One question: (Score:3, Insightful)
yeah sorry, wrote without thinking.
It doesnt have licences is the same way as commercial apps. Also agreeing to the licence is not mandatory to simply use the software, unlike the presumptions made by proprietary licences. In that way its licence is very different, but I did use the wrong words.
Re:A hodge podge mess (Score:4, Insightful)
I was thinking the opposite - they have developed an architecture that is modular enough to allow them to develop different pieces using different technologies, yet they all work together pretty seamlessly. I'd say that's quite an accomplishment!
Who gives a shit? (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess a story on /. with only 75 comments after 7 hours pretty much answers that question, eh?