Subscribe to our mailing list to get the updates to your email inbox...
Facebook is social networking. People have been “facebooking” each other for about 6 years now, making Facebook the most used social network with over 350 million users worldwide. But how does Facebook work?
In this article, I will discuss Facebook’s inner workings, covering its architecture and frontend/backend infrastructure””the nuts and bolts that hold Facebook together.
How Does Facebook Work? The Front End
Facebook uses a variety of services, tools, and programming languages to make up its core infrastructure. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache. Not a computer science expert? Let’s take a look at exactly what that means.
Linux & Apache
MySQL
For the database, Facebook utilizes MySQL because of its speed and reliability. MySQL is used primarily as a key-value store as data is randomly distributed amongst a large set of logical instances. These logical instances are spread out across physical nodes and load balancing is done at the physical node level.
As far as customizations are concerned, Facebook has developed a custom partitioning scheme in which a global ID is assigned to all data. They also have a custom archiving scheme that is based on how frequent and recent data is on a per-user basis. Most data is distributed randomly.
PHP
Memcache
Memcache 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. If it doesn’t have to go to the database it will just fetch your data from the cache based on your user ID.
How Does Facebook Work? The Back End
Facebook’s backend services are written in a variety of different programming languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang. Their philosophy for the creation of services is as follows:
1. Create a service if needed
2. Create a framework/toolset for easier creation of services
3. Use the right programming language for the task
acebook has developed.A list of all of Facebook’s open source developments can be found here. I will discuss a few of the essential tools that F
Thrift (protocol)
Thrift is a lightweight remote procedure call framework for scalable cross-language services development. Thrift supports C++, PHP, Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, Erlang, and others. It’s quick, saves development time, and provides a division of labor of work on high-performance servers and applications.
Scribe (log server)
Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real-time from many other servers. It is a scalable framework useful for logging a wide array of data. It is built on top of Thrift
Cassandra (database)
Cassandra is a database management system designed to handle large amounts of data spread out across many servers. It powers Facebook’s Inbox Search feature and provides a structured key-value store with eventual consistency.
HipHop for PHP
HipHop for PHP 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.
Be the first to Reply!
Your Feedback Is Greatly Appreciated And You Are Also Most Welcomed To Share More Information Related To The Topic.
If You Want To Be Informed About Any Replies Then Click On "Subscribe By Email" (present below of comment box).PLEASE DO NOT SPAM..
Check "HTML Tags" While Posting Commen