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I expect that running their datacenters is a larger expense than developer salaries. "In 2011, $606 million was allocated towards total capital investment in d

• evgen 15y ago
  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.
  • nbm 15y ago
    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).
• ericd 15y ago
  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++