Facebook Moves To Just-In-Time Compiler To Serve 800 Million Users Faster
22.05.12
Facebook keeps on growing rapidly with huge number of people signing up daily, heading to 1 billion users. In the mean time, Facebook team is also aware of delivering the fast and better service to their users. To keep up with the pace of increased user base, Facebook moves to HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm) with Just-In-Time compiler.
Since the beginning, Facebook has used PHP as their server-side scripting language which is best to get adopted. But, when the application gets complex, the performance isn’t so well with PHP compared to C/C++. This is the reason Facebook developed and released HipHop for PHP , as a free software in late february 2010, to convert the PHP code into optimised C++ and then it can be compiled with g++ to build binary files.
With the help of HipHop for PHP and HipHop interpreter (hphpi), Facebook reported that they reduced their CPU usage to 50% when compared to Apache or PHP. That was great, but they still need to reduce the compile and run time, which was relatively high in their static compiler (HipHop compiler).
Source: CrazyEngineers VoiCE