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A lot of the tools Facebook uses now are out of necessity because of the massive number of active users. Do I have to build something to support billions of us
by byoung2 12y ago
A lot of the tools Facebook uses now are out of necessity because of the massive number of active users. Do I have to build something to support billions of users from day one? Or do I just have to support all of the functionality but just a handful of users? The two scenarios would require vastly different approaches.
- abestic9 12y agoWell said. If I had to scale for tens of millions of users, 80% of which log in at least once per day, I would be focusing my effort on the most EFFICIENT technologies (watts per request). If there's capital, I'd look at what Facebook has done already and give it my own twist. I'd purchase the property and hardware up front and get to work building the platform, forking existing code where needed. If we're talking about 10,000 users, then I'm going to pick a technology that gives me a lot more flexibility. In fact, I would probably just extend an off-the-shelf PHP/MySQL package with an nginx EC2 instance to save myself the effort of building from scratch, because I wouldn't have to.
- 27182818284 12y agoEchoing this, I particularly hate when I see coding schools advertise that one of their 3-week graduates "created a Facebook clone" because really they created a clone of Facebook when it was 3-weeks old. Of course, when you speak with them and talk about, say, Facebook's contributions to the algorithms that handle version control in Mercurial, they had no idea about how complex things are at the 1 billion MAU scale.