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I spent a good chunk of the past year working on an internal training class and a short book about performance measurement and optimization. You can download it here. Below is an excerpt. “Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually...

Facebook started using memcached in August 2005 when Mark Zuckerberg downloaded it from the Internet and installed it on our Apache web servers. At that time, Facebook was starting to make increasingly sizable database queries on every page load, and page load times were significantly increasing. Providing a fast, snappy user experience has always been...

Every eight weeks or so Facebook employees come together for hackathons to code on projects they are passionate about. Historically, hackathons would happen overnight, but this year we started doing three-day, daytime hacks so everyone -- regardless of team, project, or personal obligations -- could get a chance to build something meaningful outside...

Every time one of the 1.2 billion people who use Facebook visits the site, they see a completely unique, dynamically generated home page. There are several different applications powering this experience--and others across the site--that require global, real-time data fetching.    Storing and accessing hundreds of petabytes of data is a huge challenge,...

A little over two years ago we launched Messenger to give people passionate about messaging a simpler and faster way to communicate with their friends. As features have been well received by our Messenger users we've brought them over to our core Facebook apps. As a result, the Messenger and messaging experience across Facebook became very similar....