Brent Sordyl's blog

Facebook Engineering – Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story

January 12, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The schedule for Timeline was very aggressive. When we sat down to build the system, one of our key priorities was eliminating technical risk by keeping the system as simple as possible and relying on internally-proven technologies. After a few discussions we decided to build on four of our core technologies: MySQL/InnoDB for storage and replication, Multifeed (the technology that powers News Feed) for ranking, Thrift for communications, and memcached for caching. We chose well-understood technologies so we could better predict capacity needs and rely on our existing monitoring and operational tool kits.

(Full Story: Facebook Engineering – Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story)

facebook, memcached, mysql, thrift

Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’

July 12, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”

(Full Story: Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’)

facebook, mysql

Datacenter power use visualized

April 25, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

(Full Story: Datacenter power use visualized)

datacenter, facebook, google

datacenter, energy, facebook, google

Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware by compiling PHP to C++

April 1, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

When Facebook moved its servers to HipHop for PHP – the code transformer it built to convert PHP into optimized C++ – the company’s average CPU usage dropped by 50 per cent. And after six months of additional engineering, the tool was about 1.8 times faster.

(Full Story: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware by compiling PHP to C++)

c++, facebook, php

c++, facebook, hiphop, php

Facebook Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes

February 14, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

When someone enters a comment, we fetch the viewership information from all of our data centers across the country, combine the information, then push the updates out. In practice, this means we have to perform multiple cross-country reads for every comment produced. But it works because our commenting rate is significantly lower than our viewing rate. Reading globally saves us from having to replicate a high volume of writes across data centers, saving expensive, long-distance bandwidth.

(Full Story: Facebook Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes)

facebook, push

Is That An Ad Growing In Your FarmVille Field? : NPR

February 9, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Zeitlin says more than 5 million users downloaded the Farmers Insurance Group airship, and in that time, Farmers’ Facebook fan page went from a handful of fans to more than 120,000.
It’s an example of real corporate money that was well spent in the virtual business world.

(Full Story: Is That An Ad Growing In Your FarmVille Field? : NPR)

advertising, facebook, zynga

Inigral SchoolsApp – Facebook for Higher Education

February 9, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Is your current social media presence all over the place? We’ve built a Facebook application designed to get your students engaged, from the point of admission through graduation.

(Full Story: Inigral SchoolsApp – Facebook for Higher Education)

e-learning, facebook