
Facebook's new front-end server design - banderon
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1711485769063510/facebook-s-new-front-end-server-design-delivers-on-performance-without-sucking-up-power/
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tiffanyh
TL;DR - FB historically has always used a dual-socket setting up. They started
noticing the trend in Intel chips to be only getting marginally faster yet
using vastly more power. They needed to change this curve. So 3 years ago they
starting working directly with Intel. The result was the Xeon-D chip. FB
current setup is a single socket Xeon-D which is faster than the old dual
socket setup and uses 1/2 the power.

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askafriend
Thank you for your service! I would pay for a TLDRAAS.

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wocram
[http://smmry.com/](http://smmry.com/) produces:

We have been using traditional two-socket servers for more than five server
generations now at Facebook.

Because our web servers are heavily compute-bound and don't require much
memory capacity, the two-socket servers we had in production had several
limitations.

Mono Lake is the server embodiment of Xeon-D and the building block for our
SOC-based server designs.

~~~
goldbrick
PyTeaser, is that you?

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lucio
Isn't ironic that all this great engineering advances (they're influencing
Intel) are all based on running more efficiently the much hated PHP?

In the future, maybe the first step to make a highly scalable green web-based
startup is to choose PHP to write your code. ;)

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PeCaN
Well... they wrote their own PHP-to-C++ compiler (which is both insane and
incredibly impressive), then their own PHP tracing JIT compiler, and their own
PHP type checker....

At what point does it become their own language?

Also a good amount of their backend services use better languages like
Haskell, D, Erlang, and whatever else they need.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
There's a reason the combination of type checking, proper containers and
generics, inline XML, and asynchronous processing is all called Hack, and the
runtime is called HHVM. At this point, new code using all these features only
vaguely resembles PHP, but it's far more robust and maintainable, and vastly
more performant.

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jasonjei
Is there any potential for Facebook to get into the cloud services market? It
seems like Facebook has the experience for high-performance, reliable cloud
platform. Using something like Kubernetes could make it easy for customers to
try out FB.

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csmajorfive
There is definitely potential but they don't want to make money that way. So,
don't expect it. Source: I was driving this internally for a while.

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mschuster91
I'd rather like to see a FB free and especially free of ads, financed by
selling cloud hardware/software.

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daeken
They just closed $18B in revenue in the past fiscal year. Even if they
successfully began selling hardware and were making twice that, they'd be
idiots to give up that huge, huge income stream. Their investors would kill
them, and for good reason.

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iamleppert
Interesting that they worked directly with Intel on this. I wonder if the cost
savings from a power perspective were worth all this engineering effort? It's
impressive in its own right to go to the lengths of customizing the hardware
in such a way, but I'm not sold on the business case.

It seems like you'd get a lot more for your money just by finding cheaper
sources of energy (or building your data centers near a cheap, renewable
source) and using commodity low power chips that have already been proven to
work well for server work loads.

~~~
wmf
Facebook is already using the cheapest energy they can find. If Facebook is
buying, say, $20M worth of Intel processors per year then you can imagine how
it's possible to get ROI on a few million worth of engineering effort.

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coldcode
Amazing to think you can have problems of scale that can only be fixed by
building a better CPU. But at FB scale everything is a bottleneck including
power. I think it would be fun to think about ways to fix problems of this
magnitude with virtually unlimited budgets. Of course having too much money
can also be a bottleneck and allow you to come with too many wrong answers as
well.

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mozumder
The next step in saving power would be adding 32GB of HBM2 on package.

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yclept
getting a 500 with the given link:
[https://i.imgur.com/w8cPBa2.png](https://i.imgur.com/w8cPBa2.png)

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ilostmykeys
Redux as clear winner for app state management?

They're wrong. Here is why:

[https://gist.github.com/idibidiart/49a095b6bc528638f34f](https://gist.github.com/idibidiart/49a095b6bc528638f34f)

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dave2000
Sites these days love their whitespace, don't they, but now the content is
fading. At this rate, in 7 years most websites will just be pointless while
rectangles. Still, should save on the server costs as it'll cache well.

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andrewpe
I don't understand your complaint. Out of all the articles I've read lately
this page seems to be easiest to read. It focuses on just the content and
formats it well.

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sp332
The text is grey instead of black. It probably looks fine on most monitors,
but I can see how it might exacerbate readability issues. It's become some
kind of received wisdom that body text shouldn't be black anymore, I just
don't understand it.

