Oh would you belive it Facebook and Open Source

bootneck02

bootneck02

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Top Seven Open Source Technologies Powering Facebook.

http://curiouspost.com/top-seven-open-source-technologies-powering-facebook/

Facebook is one of the most popular and most visited website in the world. More than 1 billion people access Facebook across different platforms like web and devices each and every day.

With such a huge user base Facebook has to handle tonnes of data every minute.In order to handle such a huge amount of data, engineers at Facebook need to deal with many challenges to keep the site up and running.
Here is what Facebook looses if it gets shut down for a minute!

  • For every 60 seconds nearly 2.46 million posts are being shared.
  • 7 Million statuses are being updated.
  • 400 GB of data is being uploaded to Facebook servers.
  • 300,000 users are logged in and nearly 450 new accounts were being registered.
  • Discussing about the revenue, Facebook earns nearly 25,000$ per minute.
At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply give up.

Hence Facebook has to rely on several software technologies to play with huge piles of data. Even though Facebook is a technology giant, it depends on Open Source technology. The core of Facebook is built upon Open Source.
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Facebook also released HHVM (http://hhvm.com/) which is a way of improving the performance of PHP (this site is coded in it). I'm following it closely to see how it works, although at the moment it's still quite some way from being useful to smaller sites like this one. It'll be really useful for some larger sites though :).

I'm surprised at some of the technology they use to power their site, but I guess as they started very small and grew quickly, they had to stick with some legacy stuff to an extent, then make it work on a larger scale.
 
Meanwhile, they killed off their API that allowed foss apps like Empathy to be used to connect to Messenger. :(
 
Core said:
Meanwhile, they killed off their API that allowed foss apps like Empathy to be used to connect to Messenger. :(
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Oh how I miss the days of being able to use a universal messenger app! I rarely messenger apps nowadays, but I must have about 10 accounts for various ones over the years (remember ICQ back in the day :D?!).
 
Ian said:
Oh how I miss the days of being able to use a universal messenger app! I rarely messenger apps nowadays, but I must have about 10 accounts for various ones over the years (remember ICQ back in the day :D?!).
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I do remember ICQ. It was my lifeline when I was in a long distance relationship with my now-ex-wife-then-girlfriend when I lived in Finland and she in the States. ICQ was just...awesome. Better than AIM or Yahoo or MSN. Google Talk I have never tried.

I think it'd be neat to use one again, but since I talk on FB Messenger a lot, the absence of support for it reduces my desire to run a universal app.
 
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