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Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#11

Post by mgkimsal »

bartl wrote: post #10

So they dropped some rarely used functionality from PHP,... like serialization. Excuse me, "rarely used"?? Drupal strongly depends on serialization, to store data structures in the database (or, as they call it, "the cache"). You cannot effectively run Drupal without serialization. So "The likes of Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress are now using HipHop." sounds like it cannot be true.

I think they're referring to how APC serializes data structures internally, not the serialize() function. I might be wrong, but that's how I read it.

edit: https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/Unimplemented-Fu...

That's a list of unimplemented functions - unserialize_callback_func is unimplemented, but that's it wrt serialization functions.

Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#12

Post by defen »

rbarooah wrote: post #4

"Unlike Google, you see, Facebook has been known to promptly open-source some of the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure."

Is this actually inaccurate though? Google has released tons of open source software, but which of them are important pieces of its back-end infrastructure? Hadoop and all its sub-projects are inspired by Google papers but aren't based on Google code, as far as I know. The projects that come to mind are Sawzall (of dubious usefulness to people outside Google), gold linker, possibly Go language (but I don't know to what extent that's used within Google), and what else? Probably a lot of contributions to open-source that it uses, like the Linux kernel, but I'm after whole projects created by Google. Python doesn't count because it was already open source before they acquired GvR.

Compare to Facebook, which has open-sourced Cassandra, Hive, HipHop, Thrift, Tornado, and others which I may be forgetting. Seems to me that Facebook is way ahead.

Edit: just remembered a Protocol Buffers, that's a good one to put under Google's column.

Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#14

Post by ChuckMcM »

Three comments: 1) The Register is to 'news' as the New York Post is to the New York Times, which is to say its amusing at times and sometimes a good lead into something that is actually important, but rarely the definitive source for any story.

2) The entrepreneurial take away is that Web 2.0 has been racing ahead of hardware, its been able to do that because computers got better faster and iterating has proven more valuable that polishing.

There are opportunities to be found by taking a good long look at where the technologies used can benefit from abstraction/compilation love. Remember that in 2005 putting together a 8,000 'node' cluster was really on the fringe, today that is 500 boxes with a dual Core i7 motherboard in them.

3) In case you haven't noticed this reads like a Facebook Fanboi insulting a Google Fanboi. Apparently it was modestly successful in this regard if you measure success by vitriol in the comments on the article.

Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#16

Post by mithra »

cmurdock wrote: post #15
mithra wrote: post #13

PHP, the COBOL of the 21st century.

No, Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. There's not a whole lot of business logic being done with PHP. There's a ton done with Java, though.

Yea but at the end of the century no one will ask with the same incredulity why we wrote anything in Java as why we wrote anything in PHP.

Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#18

Post by cjoh »

rodion_89 wrote: post #7
rbarooah wrote: post #4

"Unlike Google, you see, Facebook has been known to promptly open-source some of the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure."

"No one is using BigTable or the Second Coming of the Google File System. Except for Google." I've never read anything from theregister before, but is this really what to expect?

And the link is to Caffeine-- Google's new indexing system. It seems really crazy. Like saying:

"Facebook's servers are running blazingly fast PHP code and they're not even using Android, Google's operating system for cheap hardware."

Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#19

Post by throwaway2485 »

mithra wrote: post #16
cmurdock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. There's not a whole lot of business logic being done with PHP. There's a ton done with Java, though.

Yea but at the end of the century no one will ask with the same incredulity why we wrote anything in Java as why we wrote anything in PHP.

If you're going to inflame language wars why hide behind throwaway accounts?

Re: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

#20

Post by mithra »

throwaway2485 wrote: post #19
mithra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but at the end of the century no one will ask with the same incredulity why we wrote anything in Java as why we wrote anything in PHP.

If you're going to inflame language wars why hide behind throwaway accounts?

Haven't felt the need to comment till now. Language wars help pass the time when you need a distraction :).
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