Question

I am also a php programmer. I always wondered how do Facebook pages load so fast with so many users connecting to them at any instance. My site never reached such speed even when the traffic was less. What do they do so very well for their sites?

What should i take care of even if i want to make a website even half the speed of Facebook. I am referring to php and mysql and jquery websites.

Answer 1

Take a look at this reddit post by someone who interned at Facebook:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/nav19/facebook_releases_hhvm_60_percent_faster_than_its/c37pitt

Most relevant parts of the post:

• Database calls have cache keys. Memcached short-circuits the database hits. Facebook has a > 99.9% hit rate. Occasionally, there can be an issue which causes the hit rate to decrease to 95%. This probably doesn’t happen much, but when it did, it made the whole site unusably slow.

• Stupid database calls that fetch a lot are generally better than smart database calls that fetch minimally. Why? Because most of the stupid database calls are the same – and therefore very cacheable – and using server resources to filter stuff out is therefore much more economical than using database resources. Or, in other words, it lessens the complexity of the database calls and makes fewer at the expense of more data per database call, and more of the load shifted to memcached.