Facebook’s Insatiable Hunger for Hardware (they're running around 10,000 servers)

I would really like to rag on them for this, but the only problem that PHP is causing them is probably filtering out the incompetent n00bs that want to work there (and the opposite effect -- what hacker would want a PHP job?)

Back when they leaked their code, it was very well written. The frontend stuff was very nice "Hello, <?php echo $username ?>", not "<?php $query = "SELECT * from ..." ... ?>".

Finally, PHP is only slightly slower than Python and Perl, and slightly faster than Ruby.

So although using PHP is a horrible idea, Facebook seems to be dealing with it. It sure isn't the path of least resistance, though. It's much easier to write good $ANYTHING_ELSE than good PHP.

Probably several megawatts. For comparison, the first Russian nuclear reactor, the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, produced 5MW.