What makes Facebook do what it does? By Gavin Mais
Facebook is a social networking website that operates and owned by Facebook, Inc. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg
Memcached HipHop for PHP Haystack BigPipe Cassandra Scribe Hadoop and Hive Thrift Varnish Types of Databases Facebook Uses:
Memcached is a distributed memory caching system which Facebook uses as a caching layer between the web servers and MySQL servers. Facebook runs thousands of Memcached servers with tens of terabytes of cached data at any one point in time. Memcached
PHP which is another term for Hypertext Preprocessor, a scripting language is slow when it comes to codes that runs on a basic server. HipHop converts PHP into C++ code which then helps for better performance. This allows Facebook to get much more out of its web servers. HipHop for PHP
Haystack is Facebook’s high-performance photo storage/retrieval system. Haystack is an object store, Facebook serves around 1.2 million photos per second. Haystack
BigPipe is a dynamic web page serving system Facebook has developed. They use it to serve each web page in sections for the best performance. BigPipe
Cassandra is a distributed storage system with no single point of failure. Facebook uses it for its inbox search, it is one of the younger ones for the NoSQL movement. Cassandra
Scribe is a flexible logging system that Facebook uses for a large amount of purposes internally. It is made for handling logging at a large scale for Facebook. Scribe
Hadoop is an open source map- reduce execution that makes it possible to do calculations on a massive amount of data. Facebook uses this for data analysis. Hive came from within Facebook which makes it possible to use SQL queries against Hadoop. Hadoop and Hive
Thrift is an internally developed cross-language framework that ties all different languages together making them able to talk to each other. For example PHP, Erlang, Java and C++. Thrift
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator which acts as a load balancer and also a cache content which can then be served fast. Facebook uses it to serve photos and profile pictures, handling billions of requests everyday. Varnish
Data Center Database
Pingdom (2010). Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site. Retrieved May 9, from behind-facebook/ behind-facebook/ Wills, D., & Reeves, S. (2009). Facebook as a political weapon: Information in social networks. British Politics, 4 (2), doi: /bp “Data Center Databases” Work Cited