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Facebook Rewrites PHP Runtime For Speed
VonGuard writes "Facebook has gotten fed up with the speed of PHP. The company has been working on a skunkworks project to rewrite the PHP runtime, and on Tuesday of this week, they will be announcing the availability of their new PHP runtime as an open source project. The rumor around this began last week when the Facebook team invited some of the core PHP contributors to their campus to discuss some new open source project. I've written up everything I know about this story on the SD Times Blog."
Try the "Lite" version. It's much faster, and doesn't have that annoying chat bar.
Put identity in the browser.
From TFA: UPDATE: After sifting through the comments here and elsewhere, I'm inclined to agree with the folks who are saying that Facebook will be introducing some sort of compiler for PHP.
Not a fork. Not as newsworthy as implied.
This PHP compiler item was revealed three weeks ago by a Facebook employee. Read at http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes
Facebook added to memcache the ability to use UDP instead of TCP. They also changed MySQL so one replication-command from one datacenter to the next would also invalidate what is in memcache on that location.
At some point they have so much traffic from their webservers to their backendsystems, they saturated their internal network and were dropping UDP.
That's the kind of problems/scale they deal with, I'm surprised PHP wasn't their biggest bottleneck before (they did some work on PHP already, but not something like this).
After all Facebook is the second site after www.google.com-search page (which handles 'just' one task) and Google has pretty much a custom-build platform.
New things are always on the horizon
Scale your photos down to 604x453, which is the size Facebook displays them at, and you will get to control the sharpness and image quality.
Upload at any other size, and Facebook will re-sample them with some very cheap algorithm and apply aggressive compression and they will look like ass.
Try it, you'll be amazed how much better your photos suddenly look.
I normally use "convert -strip -sharpen 0.3 -quality 85 -geometry 604x604" before uploading - it just takes a second, and makes a huge difference.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS