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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business.

Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of sites ever had experienced. There were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level, they all had to learn as they go and what they learned was they picked the wrong language so they created HipHop, a hack to overcome PHP and probably hundreds of others that help them scale better.

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I agree with the first part, but have to quibble with the statement "there were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level."

I suppose that's true in absolute terms (nobody is at Facebooks level). However, there are definitely an army of really high traffic sites out there written in PHP, many of which predate Facebook. Problems of scale aren't exclusive to Facebook by any stretch.

It seems to me that Facebooks choice of PHP, in that context, was a big advantage. They've undoubtedly been able to draw on the experience that others have had at scale on very similar stacks. That might not have been as true for MySpace.

That said, MySpace had a whole host of internal issues. I briefly worked for a sister site at Fox Interactive Media and had at least some insight into what was going on over there. I'm sure someone will write a book about it one day:)

Wasn't Yahoo written largely in PHP?

Facebook didn't do it with "crusty old PHP;" rather, they had to re-build their stack completely from scratch to keep up. See HipHop, their homegrown PHP-to-C compiler https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/ and Cassandra, their own custom database system http://cassandra.apache.org/

If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to manage the load.

No kidding. They're using php as a template language to call thrift services. That's hardly "using php" in the sense that most people would think of it.

Back when MySpace actually mattered I don't think they had HipHop, Cassandra etc.

HipHop went live on FB last year. It didn't even go live everywhere at once.

For some reason ppl think Mark created it on the 3rd day

It would be interesting to see how much load HipHop alleviated. I assumed it helped, but how much?

apparently it allowed them to not buy 70% of new servers at a time when they were growing crazy

Could anything "off-the-shelf" have managed that load?

It depends on how many servers you are willing to run. When you have 500 million users, and a decent amount of them, accesses your site multiple times a day, CPU cycles per request starts to count.

Are there any websites that face similar load problems to Facebook's that are addressing it with an unmodified stack?

I'm pretty sure Facebook's bottleneck is the database, not the framework.

It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out. For some platforms, the best money can get you is still not good enough for an ambitious project spanning world, and having to undergo massive changes almost in realtime. Why? Because certain platforms don't attract top-notch developers.

It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms.

From linked article:

> Silicon Valley has lots of talent like him. Think about the technology he knows. Hint, it isn’t Microsoft.

http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-t...

"It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out."

That's the number one benefit of an open source stack: it's possible to know the stack inside out. If it's closed source, there's an eventual point at which you're dealing with a black box.

There is nothing black box about the MS stack. The .net bcl might be closed source but you can still step into and read the source. It's available under the MS-RSL license. Which allows you:

"use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software"

See: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/

> And they did it with crusty old PHP

PHP is actually a good templating language and a passable rapid-prototyping language. The fact is that it's more important to stay agile when you're growing exponentially then to pick some optimal technology.

PHP's simplicity makes it one of the best choices to be able to incrementally build a robust and scalable back-end underneath it as you go. ColdFusion and .NET I imagine to be some of the worst (though I have no experience with either, so maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about).

Sorry but I cannot resist. Don't comment on things you know nothing about.

Ever heard of JBOSS? Did you know they have an open source CFML project called Railo? Or that Chris Schalk, developer advocate, from Google called what another open source cfml distro called Open Blue Dragon was doing on the GAE as "awesome". He said it was the easiest way to get running on the GAE.

The best developers can do amazing things in a number of different languages.

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