

Scaling Facebook vs. scaling LinkedIn - ilamont
http://thestandard.com/news/2008/07/01/facebook-and-linkedin-talk-about-scaling

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t0pj
Following the link:
[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9980569-80.html?part=rss&#...</a><p>Jonathan
Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook
said:<p><i>"...through that process we were able to lock in prices today and
carry those prices forward as all the commodity components costs
drop."</i><p>Is it just me? Don't you want the new <i>future</i> pricing as
commodity component costs drop? Why lock in and carry forward today's prices
concerning technology?<p>Please help me with this one.

~~~
gaius
I can only assume he's got a fixed price on whatever the vendor's equivalent
machine is at any point in the future. So in a year's time he'd be getting
more power, but he would still be paying x dollars for y U in a rack.

------
gaius
_Using PHP as the primary development language_

I'm not sure that's true. PHP is certainly the language that generates the
HTML the user sees, but I REALLY doubt all the computation on the social graph
(i.e. the clever/resource hungry bit of Facebook) is done in PHP.

~~~
fourlittlebees
_But one of the reasons we're very lucky is our engineering team has selected
to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly
generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main
server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then
consolidate our buying power._

Scary, but that's what he said. Could be why they need another $100 million
for servers. ;)

