Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

I think developing in PHP and compiling to C++/binary probably results in much higher developer productivity than developing in C++/C# directly. Developer salaries are undoubtedly their largest expense, by far, dwarfing those salaries of the people who make PHP performant and 1.5 gig binary updates sane.

View on HN

I expect that running their datacenters is a larger expense than developer salaries.

"In 2011, $606 million was allocated towards total capital investment in data center infrastructure by Facebook, which includes the cost of servers, networking equipment, construction, and storage." - http://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/facebook-data-center-i...

The assumption that migrating the entire www stack to something like C++ would help with the datacenter costs is not supported by reality. Please remember that the bits that are in PHP are mostly front-end code. This handles the presentation of the data, but the actual heavy-lifting and data manipulation is done by the back-end infrastructure which is mostly C/C++ with some Java thrown in for the hadoop bits.

I would disagree here - every percent CPU saved for the same workload is a 1% reduction in the number of machines needed. The number of web machines is sufficiently large that savings of even 1% are praiseworthy. Quite a bit of effort is expended to keep this going down and to the right (at least some of the time).

Ah, good point, my estimate of their hardware spending wasn't that high. With 3000+ employees, depending on average total compensation, it might be close. That said, I would still guess that they'd choose greater developer productivity and agility over savings on server costs.

I wonder if there are any public benchmarks of compiled Hiphop vs. C++

Reply on news.ycombinator.com