3. Platform Architecture Overview

With such a large number of active users, Facebook has enormous demands on its infrastructure. Facebook also has a vibrant application community and needs to provide a fast and reliable interface for developers to use. To accomplish this, Facebook has embraced many open source technologies and contributed many improvements back into the community.

This chapter describes how the Facebook Platform works: the servers and software it runs on and the mechanisms that developers can use to interact with it.

Facebook’s Internal Servers

According to Facebook, it is the second most-trafficked PHP-based website in the world, one of the largest users of the MySQL database, and the largest user of memcached, which is a ...

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