How Facebook encodes your videos

People upload hundreds of millions of videos to Facebook every day. Making sure every video is delivered at the best quality — with the highest resolution and as little buffering as possible — means optimizing not only when and how our video codecs compress and decompress videos for viewing, but also which codecs are used for which videos. But the sheer...

2w

Advancing connectivity between the Asia-Pacific region and North America

We are announcing two vital new subsea cables to connect Singapore, Indonesia, and North America.  These will be the first transpacific cables through a new diverse route crossing the Java Sea and will increase overall transpacific capacity by 70 percent.   We are committed to bringing more people online to a faster internet. As part of this effort,...

3w

Boosting the performance of virtual machines with Jump-Start

What the research is: Jump-Start is a new approach for improving the performance of virtual machines at scale. Virtual machines are a modern and popular design to implement programming languages used to build applications in general, including large-scale websites like Facebook and Instagram. However, virtual machines incur well-known performance...

Mar 2021

Mitigating the effects of silent data corruption at scale

What the research is:  Silent data corruption, or data errors that go undetected by the larger system, is a widespread problem for large-scale infrastructure systems. This type of corruption can propagate across the stack and manifest as application-level problems. It can also result in data loss and require months to debug and resolve. This work describes...

Feb 2021

FOQS: Scaling a distributed priority queue

We will be hosting a talk about our work on Scaling a Distributed Priority Queue during our virtual Systems @Scale event at 11 am PT on Wednesday, February 24, followed by a live Q&A session. Please submit any questions to systemsatscale@fb.com before the event. The entire Facebook ecosystem is powered by thousands of distributed systems and microservices,...

Feb 2021

Faster, more efficient systems for finding and fixing regressions

Every workday, Facebook engineers commit thousands of diffs (which is a change consisting of one or more files) into production. This code velocity allows us to rapidly ship new features, deliver bug fixes and optimizations, and run experiments. However, a natural downside to moving quickly in any industry is the risk of inadvertently causing regressions...

Feb 2021

Minesweeper automates root cause analysis as a first-line defense against bugs

Root cause analysis (RCA) is an important part of fixing any bug. After all, you can’t solve a problem without getting to the heart of it. But RCA isn’t always simple, especially at a scale like Facebook’s. When billions of people are using an app on a variety of platforms and devices, a single bug can create several different issues on its own and...

Feb 2021

Open-sourcing Thrift for Haskell

What it is: Thrift is a serialization and remote procedure call (RPC) framework used for cross-service communication. Most services at Facebook communicate via Thrift because it provides a simple, language-agnostic protocol for communicating with structured data. Thrift can already be used in programming languages such as C++, Python, and Java using...

Feb 2021

How machine learning powers Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm

Designing a personalized ranking system for more than 2 billion people (all with different interests) and a plethora of content to select from presents significant, complex challenges. This is something we tackle every day with News Feed ranking. Without machine learning (ML), people’s News Feeds could be flooded with content they don’t find as relevant...

Jan 2021

2020 year in review: Connectivity innovations, faster apps, and progress toward net zero

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a challenging year, to put it lightly. But if anything, the COVID-19 pandemic has shined a light on our need to connect as people. For Facebook, that meant our work has become more important than ever. Whether it was finding new and innovative ways to expand internet connectivity, releasing new tools for engineers...

Dec 2020