The developers over at Facebook are big fans of PHP for it's
ease of use and speed of development. However they are not a big fan of the drag the scripting language has on CPU and
resources, especially in a scaled environment such as Facebook, can
significantly lessen its appeal.
However the team over have been
working on a "source code transformer", called HipHop for PHP, which
converts PHP code into C++ to increase performance. According to a post
by Facebook Senior Server Engineer Haiping Zhao, using HipHop has
reduced Facebook's server CPU load by around 50%.
Whilst HipHop has been in development for a while, the Facebook team
has now released the source code to the public, six months after
beginning to deploy the system on the Facebook network. More than 90%
of Facebook's web traffic now runs on HipHop code.
More detailed informaton can be found in Zhao's post
on the Facebook Developer Blog and he will also be giving a live presentation via UStream at 2:30pm EDST (7:30pm PST).
