Over 800 million people actively use Facebook; updating their status, replying to messages, uploading photos, videos and so on.

Consider these numbers:
- 1 TRILLION page views per month
- Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- 250 million photos are uploaded per day
- More than 70 languages available on the site
- Facebook users install apps more than 20 million times every day

How do they manage to deliver this fantastic service without compromising on speed. How is FaceBook’s performance so good?

There’s no single reason, but a whole lot of reasons:

- Heavy usage of caching (APC and memcached), which drastically cuts processing time (30x faster!)

- Usage of HipHop, which converts PHP into C++ code (which is then compiled into much more efficient machine code than actual PHP).

- Facebook uses PHP and MySQL, but that’s not the only thing they use. For example, they use Erlang for their chat, Hadoop clusters for some of their storage. They also use our favourite programming language: PYTHON

- Facebook has data distributed across many, many servers. In June 2010, FB had 60,000 servers. (think that’s too much? Google had half a million… 5 years ago) And yes they own the data center!

- Facebook sends as little traffic as possible: they use static CDNs to deliver static content. Gzip to compress data. Cookies, Javascript, HTML – everything is cut back to reduce the number of bytes sent over the network. They use a technology they call “BigPipe”, which sends partial content rather than the whole page.