

Ask HN: Does Facebook Run on localhost? - sgy

how do big websites get tested? or get tested locally?
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bazzargh
Facebook gave a presentation about their development practices at OSCON in
Portland last July, it was interesting (I was in the room at the time):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax9KR_PaiEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax9KR_PaiEM)

...the thing that sticks in my mind was, yes it runs on localhost, where the
localhost dev env has 3TB SSD and 144GB of memory :)

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AJAr
Lots of insight—and several great projects—on their blog:
[https://code.facebook.com](https://code.facebook.com)

Things work a little different for Facebook than they do for sites with more
reasonable traffic. I've seen a few talks on YouTube where they speak about
the challenges of scalability as they gradually hot swap legacy X or Y for
their own in-house component Z.

See React/JSX and Flux, and the Haxl library. They go into detail about some
of the problems and solutions that they've made public with respect to those
projects, and they speak a lot about testing too in many of the posts. Worth
checking out.

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jmcohen
Yes, every engineer there has a dev server running a copy of Facebook.

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MichaelCrawford
I'd link to an article I wrote about website testing, but I used mod_rewrite
to redirect every URL on my site to "Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations".

When I stop being so pissed off, you'll find my article at
[http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/web-application-
testi...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/web-application-testing/)

tl;dr: use a load generator. I wrote the article after some jackass woke me
and my new bridge out of bed at three in the morning because his sun
ultrasparc server fell over when brought live just in time for the christmas
shopping season.

