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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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