How to keep Facebook server from collapsing?

By the second quarter of 2018, Facebook had over 2.23 billion active monthly users.With such users, this is one of the busiest web sites in the Internet world and must build a special database architecture to meet.

Facebook launched in February 2004, originally launched by Mark Zuckerberg in his university (Harvard University) and used a single server.But as the number of users is increasing, the number of servers and data centers of the world's largest social networking site is also expanding, spreading all over the world.

Each data center puts thousands of servers connected to each other and to the outside world with fiber optics.Every time you share information on Facebook, the servers on these data centers receive information and distribute them to their 'friends'.

By March 2013, Facebook had 12 data centers worldwide, including 9 in the US and 3 in other countries with a total area of ​​nearly 15 million square feet (completed and under construction).Each center is approximately 1,000 feet long, consists of many rows with tens of thousands of servers.

Facebook data center in Sweden

How does Facebook maintain its server?

The answer is Hip Hop for PHP and Hip Hop Virtual Machine - 2 technologies developed by Facebook to handle traffic more than 500 times in the same time on the server.Their goal is not only to handle traffic more efficiently but also to consume less Internet data, enabling mobile users not to worry about mobile traffic when using Facebook on mobile devices.These technologies and load balancing capabilities help Facebook expand its storage capacity without sacrificing download speeds.

Hip Hop for PHP (HPHPc) is a source-to-source compiler (source to source), whereby PHP is compiled into C ++ into binary files and runs as an executable file.Besides HPHPc, Facebook engineers also create a "developer version" of Hip Hop (PHP implementation engine version, called HPHPi) and a Hip Hop debug tool (called HPHPd).

Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is a PHP processing platform that helps speed up PHP using a virtual processor based on the JIT (Just-in-Time) compiler.

See more:

1. Explore inside Facebook's data center in Europe
2. How does Facebook configure millions of servers every day?
3. How to download data on Facebook, Google Photos and many other services