Scaling Facebook vs. scaling LinkedIn

thestandard.com

11 points·ilamont··4 comments

Following the link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9980569-80.html?part=rss&#...

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook said:

"...through that process we were able to lock in prices today and carry those prices forward as all the commodity components costs drop."

Is it just me? Don't you want the new future pricing as commodity component costs drop? Why lock in and carry forward today's prices concerning technology?

Please help me with this one.

I can only assume he's got a fixed price on whatever the vendor's equivalent machine is at any point in the future. So in a year's time he'd be getting more power, but he would still be paying x dollars for y U in a rack.

Using PHP as the primary development language

I'm not sure that's true. PHP is certainly the language that generates the HTML the user sees, but I REALLY doubt all the computation on the social graph (i.e. the clever/resource hungry bit of Facebook) is done in PHP.

But one of the reasons we're very lucky is our engineering team has selected to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then consolidate our buying power.

Scary, but that's what he said. Could be why they need another $100 million for servers. ;)

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