Introducing our 2019 Sustainability Report

As the world navigates the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are focusing not only on their business strategy, but also on their approach to key environmental and social issues. One of several areas we are focusing on now is our commitment to sustainable business practices and reporting. Today, we are taking another important step toward increased transparency...

2d

Retrie: Haskell refactoring made easy

What’s new: We’ve open-sourced Retrie, a code refactoring tool for Haskell that makes codemodding faster, easier, and safer. Using Retrie, developers can efficiently rewrite large codebases (exceeding 1 million lines), express rewrites as equations in Haskell syntax instead of regular expressions, and avoid large classes of codemodding errors. Retrie’s...

3d

Building a transformative subsea cable to better connect Africa

Connectivity is at the heart of our mission to give people the power to build community. We are committed to bringing more people online to a faster internet — and with 3.5 billion people globally unconnected, there is still a lot to do. Africa is currently the least connected continent, with just over a quarter of its 1.3 billion people connected to...

May 2020

Accelerometer and SoftSKU: Improving hardware platform performance for diverse microservices

What the research is: New strategies to improve the performance of hardware platforms running Facebook’s microservices. SoftSKU is a novel mechanism that tailors an existing server processor to optimize it for a specific microservice without requiring any additional hardware. Accelerometer is an analytical model that predicts gains from these optimizations...

May 2020

Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com

Facebook.com launched in 2004 as a simple, server-rendered PHP website. Over time, we’ve added layer upon layer of new technology to deliver more interactive features. Each of these new features and technologies incrementally slowed the site down and made it harder to maintain. This made it harder to introduce new experiences. Features like dark mode...

May 2020

Implementing a secure web-based proxy service for Discover

Our connectivity efforts focus on expanding internet access and adoption around the world. This includes our work on technologies like Terragraph, our collaboration with mobile operators on efforts to expand rural access, our work as part of the Telecom Infra Project, and programs like Free Basics. As we’ve continued working on Free Basics, we’ve listened...

May 2020

Turbine: Facebook’s service management platform for stream processing

What the research is:  A scalable service management platform for Facebook’s stream processing service. Turbine is designed to bridge the gap between the capabilities of existing general-purpose cluster management frameworks like Tupperware and Facebook’s stream processing requirements. In production for several years now, Turbine has enabled a boom...

Apr 2020

Building a more accurate time service at Facebook scale

Almost all of the billions of devices connected to the internet have onboard clocks, which need to be accurate to properly perform their functions. Many clocks contain inaccurate internal oscillators, which can cause seconds of inaccuracy per day and need to be periodically corrected. Incorrect time can lead to issues, such as missing an important reminder...

Mar 2020

Preventing performance regressions with Health Compass and Incident Tracker

Facebook’s codebase changes frequently each day as engineers develop new features and optimizations for our apps. If not handled properly, each of these changes could potentially regress performance for billions of people around the world. At each step in the development process, we apply a suite of automated regression detection tools to mitigate these...

Mar 2020

Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, and simpler messaging app

We are excited to begin rolling out the new version of Messenger on iOS. To make the Messenger iOS app faster, smaller, and simpler, we rebuilt the architecture and rewrote the entire codebase, which is an incredibly rare undertaking and involved engineers from across the company. Compared with the previous iOS version, this new Messenger is twice...

Mar 2020