Facebook is a real phenomenon. The largest social network in the world is valued at one hundred billion dollars. It has over a billion users. But storing data, photos and messages for more than a seventh of the world's population requires advanced technology. So how is it done?

Northern California. Valley of computer giants. Here is the name that attracts the most tourists - Facebook.

It's a social network invented by Harvard students in 2004 that lets your friends know what you're doing with just one click. For many, there is nothing cooler than networking. Eight years after the company was born, it went public at an incredible $104 billion. It is noticeable that Facebook was created by students. They do everything in their own way. graffiti and touch screen all over the wall. In vending machines, instead of cans of drinks, boxes of gadgets are sold. Open bars and video games for staff with an average age of 26. It looks like this weird environment is working. Facebook is visited by people from all over the world. Every six months their number increases by 100 million. Handling the personal data of so many people is no easy task.

Says a company employee: “We have one engineer for every million users. We are operating on an unprecedented scale.”

They cannot take advantage of other people's experience. Because there has never been such a large number of visitors on any site before. And when you have more users than there are machines in the world, one of the biggest problems is storage. Your laptop's hard drive fits in your hand. Something more is needed here.

In Primeville, Oregon, there is a huge data center - 28,000 square meters.

It's like a memory card the size of three football fields, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is where your information is stored. On state-of-the-art servers, in vast memory banks, between which data travels at the speed of light over nearly 6,500 kilometers of fiber optic cables. Says Cam Patchet, general manager of the data center: “When you enter the address facebook.com, your request goes to the Internet and then here, and here one of the Facebook servers is requested. Your profile, all data associated with it, is processed and compiled by our data centers and sent back to you via the Internet. All this happens in milliseconds. Some people think of the Internet as something like a cloud floating in the sky. But no, it's a material thing. The Internet is computers, servers and data centers connected by kilometers of cable around the world. All these units can communicate with each other and share data.”

If you want to visualize the Internet, these endless rows of servers are a great illustration. Compared to this place, the supercomputer looks like a pocket calculator. 30 megawatts of electricity is supplied here, so electricity is always available.

But, like the absence backup data from your computer, a power outage can be a disaster here. For millions of teenagers, a world without social media is simply unimaginable. Therefore, huge diesel generators are at the ready. In the event that the main line in the building is turned off, these generators will come into operation. Employees are constantly watching them. They generate 3 megawatts each, and there are 14 of them.

Another problem: all this equipment generates a huge amount of heat. Without cooling, these servers will fail. CPU home computer cooled by a cooler slightly larger than a matchbox.

Here, for this, there is an extensive seven-room penthouse - modern system natural conditioning. Cold air from the highlands of Oregon is drawn in, filtered, and mixed with warm air to control the temperature in the data center.

The water mist, which is sprayed by nozzles, controls the humidity.

Cooled air is supplied from reverse side servers to prevent overheating. And finally, excess warm air is drawn out by huge fans, a hundred times more than what is in a home computer.

More fans will be needed soon because the social network is just boiling over. Nearly 600 million people visit the site every day. That's almost double the population of the US. And the site continues to grow. A thousand new servers are brought here every day. Tom Furlong is in charge of data centers. When I started 4.5 years ago, he says, we had 27 million users and several thousand servers. Today we received a thousand servers, and I barely noticed it.

Huge trucks come here. They don't deliver groceries. They bring more and more memory for servers. Most of us are familiar with gigabytes and terabytes. Here the bill goes to petabytes. More than 100 petabytes of photos and videos are stored on Facebook's servers, and more are added every day. This is an incredible amount of information.

Every day, the data center receives 100,000 times more data than it can hold. HDD advanced personal computer. Each server rack has 500 terabytes, more than 130 billion times the size of Apple's first PC. And if a server goes down, the task of finding the needle in the digital haystack is left to technicians like David Gaillard.

The hard drive is out of order and he goes in search of the right rack in the labyrinth of buzzing servers. Once found, David replaces the entire fee for the time it takes you to update your status. But David and the other technicians are not omnipotent. Around the world, almost 2.5 billion people have access to the Internet. And everyone spends 20% of their time online on social media, uploading hundreds of millions of photos, messages and updates daily. With such activity, even in such a huge data center, space is running out. Builders are already working on increasing the capacity. But with this scale of network activity, they'd better hurry.

Not a net, but a sieve

Before the scandal began, information about how third party applications use the personal data of Facebook users was contained in the company's privacy policy in a rather complex form for perception. Even Zuckerberg himself stated in Congress that the majority of the audience does not read this document or does not delve into what is written in it. Immediately after the investigation began, the company began to explain what third-party companies receive, and promised to tighten the rules for access to information for the latter. From one of these explanations Facebook follows:

Until now, any user could find the person he needed by entering his phone number or email in the search bar. This feature could also be used by hackers.
Facebook kept the history of calls and correspondence of smartphone owners on Android platform that have been installed Facebook apps Messenger and Facebook Lite. The company promised to analyze this feature to make sure that user messages themselves were not stored. Zuckerberg disproved one of the popular myths about the ability to eavesdrop on a user’s conversation and then show targeted ads (clients made this conclusion because when installing an application on a smartphone, the social network requests access to the microphone): access to the microphone is needed only for correct video playback.
Administrators and members closed groups could give third-party applications access to the list of group members and their personal data (names; photos attached to posts, comments to them).
Third-party applications could read any posts and comments on them through the API (programming interface) of the pages.
Until 2014, third-party applications could request information from Facebook not only about the user himself, but also about his friends. After making changes, applications can only receive information about those friends who have agreed to share it. In March 2018, Facebook also stated that it would revoke user permissions to collect information if the app had not been used for more than three months.

Facebook currently collects two types of data. The first is the information that people themselves post in social network: photos, posts, etc. The second is those that are necessary for targeted advertising. To increase its effectiveness, Facebook also buys the services of information brokers (data-brokers). The latter collect information from many sources - platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook, as well as companies operating in industries that are relevant to the use of data about people (media, retail, telecommunications and finance) - and provide other companies with services related to targeted advertising and scoring - checking borrowers of banks and clients of insurance companies. According to a report from Cracked Labs, a research institute, Facebook had six such partners in 2017: Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, Oracle, CCC Marketing and Quantium. They helped the platform better sort and classify its users.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Facebook does not sell or share user data with advertisers. As the representative of the social network explained, they analyze them and then categorize them according to their preferences. If an advertiser wants their ad to be seen by “Atlanta women cyclists,” Facebook serves ads to that category of users without sharing their data with third parties. Reports for advertisers contain only generalized information about how successful the ad was - how many people and what gender clicked on the banner, and other statistics.

What do third-party sites and applications do with open information Facebook users is not known for certain. It is only clear that this information is collected by many companies.

Test it

Not only Alexander Kogan used tests to collect information on Facebook, many developers do it. RBC analyzed the privacy policies of some of them.

nametests.com

Nametests.com, owned by Socialsweethearts (offering “What April has in store for you?”, “What does your ideal partner look like” tests, etc.), gains access to user data on Facebook if registration goes through this social network. The user agrees to transfer information about his public profile, list of friends, address Email and likes. The company's privacy policy states that it keeps the requested information anonymous and uses it to compile statistics and improve the site. The use of data without anonymization is allowed only in cases provided for by law, as well as for the purposes necessary to ensure the functioning of the service, security and optimization, stated in the documents of Socialsweethearts.

According to a spokesperson for Socialsweethearts, once an account is deleted, user data will also be deleted. “We do not analyze or conduct data research for political or other similar purposes, nor do we cooperate with companies or organizations involved in such research,” he assured.

According to him, Socialsweethearts is now preparing to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into force in the European Union on May 25, 2018. “We understand, given the news around Facebook, that user confidence [in the safety of their personal data] is very important, and at the same time, processes related to their personal data must be transparent,” says a representative of Socialsweethearts.

Playbuzz

Playbuzz, which also owns a site with tests, is also preparing for the introduction of the GDPR, a representative of this company said. The current version of the Playbuzz privacy policy states that the platform may collect personal information that is entered during registration; information about the device from which the user accesses the site; as well as answers from passed tests. In addition, Playbuzz collects personal information of users obtained from third parties for marketing purposes, and may also share anonymized information about people in aggregate form with its partners for advertising purposes.

A Playbuzz representative noted that due to the platform's content being monetized, some of the company's partners, as well as third-party providers (such as fraud detection services) may collect data from some end users (such as IP addresses). "This data is not available to Playbuzz and is not stored on our servers," he added.

Even if the user deletes his page on the site, Playbuzz reserves the right to transfer his personal data to third parties, its business partners, for non-marketing purposes (for example, to contact the user).

Brainfall Media

The service agreement of Brainfall Media (which is engaged in online research and also collects personal data on Facebook) says that the company considers user information as a business asset and has the right to transfer it to third parties with the consent of users. The company did not respond to RBC's request.

Spies on smartphones

Websites on the Internet equipped with visit trackers, and mobile applications are real “black holes”: no one can truly appreciate who they share data with, noted in a Cracked Labs study. In 2015, a survey of popular apps in Australia, Brazil, Germany, and the US by the NICTA Research Center and the University of New South Wales found that 85-95% are free and up to 60% paid apps collected user information for the benefit of third parties. RBC journalists analyzed applications that collected information from their Facebook accounts. Among them were the programs of several well-known developers.

"Access to general information profile and email address is provided to all accredited applications automatically. Permission to request this data is included in the minimum Facebook basic set for application developers, and the social network has no narrower request, ”Stepan Danilov, founder and CEO of the MeYou networking service, explained to RBC. Basic permissions don't require developer verification, but everyone else who claims to get more information does, according to Facebook's "permission help" for developers.

The applications of the Rambler Group developer, such as LiveJournal and Afisha-eda, also requested information about the user's city of residence and hometown, access to publications in the chronicle. The representative of the press service of the Rambler Group explained that clients of their media resources can log in, including through Facebook. This authorization method allows you to fully use the capabilities of applications, for example, participate in voting, leave comments, etc. “For our part, we get the potential opportunity to work with BigData and, in the future, set up “smart targeting”, increasing the efficiency of interaction with advertising media for both users and advertisers. Ideally, people are willing to interact only with those ads that may be of potential interest to them. On the other hand, the advertiser gets in touch with a potentially highly motivated user,” he added.

The Amediateka series viewer application, among other things, gets access to the client's friends list. "List of friends on this moment is not used, but it is intended to update the recommender system based on the interests of the user's friends,” said Amedia TV representative Milana Bogatyreva.

Some apps requested access to Facebook users' status updates, photos, and videos. Take TripAdvisor for example. The Nokia application had access to, among other things, data on marital status, places of work, preferences, education, religious and political beliefs, and other information. Representatives of TripAdvisor and HMD Global (which owns the rights to the Nokia brand) did not answer questions from RBC.

Custom Soul Collectors

Facebook is not the main source of user data. In the Cracked Labs study, information brokers are named as the main sources. Cracked Labs experts named Acxiom and Oracle as the largest such companies. For example, Acxiom has been collecting data about consumers from public sources for decades: telephone directories, court records, criminal reports, various registries, questionnaires, surveys, etc. Later, digital sources were added to this, for example, large IT companies whose software allows you to analyze telephone conversations, financial transactions, activity on the Internet, etc., to identify criminal and terrorist activity.

In addition, Acxiom cooperates with Ibotta (collects purchase data using information from loyalty cards or checks), Samba TV (collects TV viewing data through programs installed on set-top boxes or video-on-demand platforms), Crossix (collects medical information, including medical history, doctor's prescriptions, prescriptions, etc.), FreckleIOT (real-time location data of a person: special sensors can be installed in various stores, airports, bars, etc., with which they can contact user's smartphone and send information) and other companies that mainly operate in the United States. Acxiom stores this information in the form of a unique anonymous ID - a kind of code that is associated with postal address, phone number, email, IP address, geolocation, cookie, device ID. Each unique Acxiom ID has several categories assigned to it, to which the person corresponds. The client can give Acxiom the email of a certain consumer and request information on which categories the information broker classifies him in.

There is no single system for estimating the size of the user data market. According to a study by 451 Research, the volume of the global data market for only telecommunications companies in 2015 amounted to $24 billion, and by 2020 should increase to $79 billion. Mobile operators in at least ten countries (Russia was not one of them) were noticed that they installed a special mechanism to track the behavior of subscribers when surfing the Internet. Moreover, surfers could not block such "super-cookies".

Currently, user data is used to sell targeted advertising and scoring, but in the future it may find other, less secure uses. For example, the data can be used to dynamically change the prices of products on an online store site based on who visits it. It can be either a price reduction if the system considers this user a valuable consumer for the company in the long term, or an increase depending on how much a particular user is willing to pay for the item at the moment. With the help of personalization, companies can try to influence consumer behavior, show him ads at a certain moment so that he makes a purchase.

Reading time: 7 minutes

Collecting a database using Facebook is sometimes more profitable and more convenient than using a website. And as an additional source of leads, social networks are an ideal platform. Facebook has a tool that collects customer contacts through ads. The advantage of this method is that the client does not need to enter a million fields, the system will automatically pull up email, phone, name and any other information from the Facebook database. That is, the client sees the advertisement, clicks, an already completed form appears - all that remains is to press the submit button.

Gathering a database through social networks

No one chooses between channels of communication with the client anymore. Instagram, Vkontakte, Facebook, Telegram, YouTube chatbots and others - brands communicate with the client on all possible platforms. Marketers use every opportunity for an extra “touch” ". Therefore, it is important that advertising, mailing lists, and social networks work together and help, and not interfere with each other.

For example, it is already difficult to find a letter that does not contain social network buttons with a call to subscribe.

Aviasales

Conversely, social networks are a great opportunity to lure readers into the mailing list. For what? Posts in chats or on pages cannot be long, it is difficult to fill them with instructions with screenshots, it is not always convenient to watch a video with sound - there are limitations in each channel.

The letter can be put aside and read at a more convenient moment. You can add any information in it with merch tags - this is when some information about a client is pulled from your database. For example, how many days have passed since the last purchase or how many new words he learned thanks to your platform.

Audience on Facebook

Set up advertising on the principle of "somewhere, let it fall ' is a bad story. Think you know your target audience or want to set up broad targeting. If you choose the latter, Facebook's algorithms will themselves look for "your" customers.

If you want to set targeting yourself, you will have to dig deeper.Custom audiences on Facebook are divided into:

Or create lookalike audiences - the algorithm will look for people with characteristics that match your customers or leads. It can be geo, age, interests - any parameters that you set.

Targeting options are multifaceted and you can work with each audience separately. Create personalized ads and make individual offers to each potential client.

How to set up a Facebook Lead Form?

In the first step of setting up Facebook ads, click on "Lead Generation". Enter the name of the campaign. In the next step, we accept the conditions for using advertising to generate leads (if you don’t find it here link ).

Next, set up which audience the ad will be broadcast to.. As for placements, we do not recommend advertising on Instagram, as there the collection form is displayed “crookedly” and only annoys users.

Now we create a form for collecting data. It is created and edited at the 3rd step of creating an advertisement. Click on Lead Generation Form.

What data can be extracted from there:

contact details (phone, email, name, city, etc.)
demographic data (date of birth, gender, marital status, etc.)
job information (position, company)
as well as your questions (short and alternative answers, date of visit, for example, for spheres from HoReCa).

But we are a mailing service

Therefore, it is necessary that the leads fall into the mailing list. For integration with Facebook we use Zapier service. Mailigen has full integration with this tool.

Often regular user this will finish reading. Since the words integration, API, keys, webhooks only repel. There is an exit. That's why this article was written :)

How to integrate Facebook and Mailigen

For this we need:

Go!

To start on home page you need to select Facebook Lead Ads and Mailigen as the services we will work with:

Below we will be shown a single zap for combining them:

Click on this zap, and go straight to filling it out.

Since we have chosen the services we will work with - the first two steps have already been completed for us, just click "Continue" and we get to the third step: adding a Facebook account.

Click on the “Connect an Account” button, and issue the necessary permissions on behalf of your profile to administrative rights to the company page on Facebook and Facebook Lead Ads (Important!)

The account has been added to the list. Select it and click "Continue".

The fourth step allows you to select a company page and a Facebook Lead Ads subscription form that will transfer data to Mailigen:

If not visible desired page or forms, then check your access to the page and "Facebook Lead Ads".

The next page allows you to check the creation of leads and whether everything is set up correctly. Create a test lead and check how Facebook Lead Ads integrations work:

The next step is to set up integration with Mailigen. The first two steps are already completed for us, as well as for Facebook Lead Ads, so let's move on to adding the Mailigen account. You will be prompted to enter an API key, read how to get it

After entering the key, verifying it and selecting the required account, proceed to the next step, where you can configure which list, with which options (for example, with or without double confirmation) and in which fields to upload the received data:

If a test lead was created from Facebook Lead Ads, then the fields can be selected directly with the values of the test lead, so as not to make a mistake.

Once you've completed the setup with all the fields, move on to the next step and test adding a test lead to Mailigen.

If the test was successful, then congratulations, your first zap is ready to go, run it!

That's all. You now have a working link between your Facebook and Mailigen ads. And you were afraid. Use on health!

Although Facebook in terms of prevalence among the Russian-speaking audience loses to such social networks as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, it is still a very popular platform for social activity on the Internet. But not everyone knows how this social network actually uses information about its users. Next, we will tell you how this resource is following us and what you need to do to protect your personal data.

How Facebook is following us

In 2014, representatives of this worldwide social network reported that their servers receive approximately 600 terabytes of data every day - 193 million copies of the book "War and Peace" could be compared with this amount of information. Several years have passed, and there is no doubt that since then the daily volume of data has increased significantly. Just imagine how much personal information this company owns!

“Well, what things can a social network learn about me? I am a law-abiding citizen, and I have nothing to hide, ”an ordinary user thinks and automatically checks the box that describes the Privacy Policy of the resource. But even if everyone read this document, some information about the use of personal data still remains “between the lines”.

What exactly has Facebook learned to study users' personal data? Much more than you might think!

It sees what users were going to write

Perhaps the most interesting and even compromising information is contained in those messages that we typed in the heat of the moment, but for various reasons were never sent, or rewritten in a different way. And do not think that no one has seen it but you!

The social network actually spoke about this “skill” itself, publishing its own study on self-censorship (“Self-censorship on Facebook”, 2013), which explained why and how users correct their posts before publishing. It turns out that the system is able to register keystrokes while typing. It turns out that once typed personal data may already remain in the database of the social network, even if you erase them.

It transfers personal data to third parties

Unsent data is secretly studied by Facebook to compile a portrait of the user's personality, but the resource can use already published information as promised in license agreement. And this includes not only personality research and any own research - the system transfers your personal data to marketing companies and the US government.

Know: even if you did not indicate the number in your profile mobile phone or email address, but one of your friends tried to find you using this data, then the system already knows this information.

What’s more, the social network also works with other sites you visit to collect missing information, such as your income, online behavior, etc., and then tailors your newsfeed to promote targeted ads.

It tries to determine the user's face

It follows you even when you are offline

Here, too, the inattentively read Privacy Policy of this site makes itself felt, which clearly states that:

To collect personal data in this way, the system is allowed by single sign-on technology and cookies. In addition, the social network is trying, or has already learned to track the movement of the cursor on the screen.

What is the main danger of using Facebook

As we mentioned above, in addition to setting up relevant posts, advertising and sales, users' personal data is transferred to the US government in which the social network is registered. But the power of countries is not concentrated in the hands of presidents, prime ministers and other officials - in addition to them, there is a secret group of powerful representatives of the richest clans in the world who control all types of industry, banking system, territorial boundaries... This group is designated by the term "world government".

Its goal is to establish a new world order, implying total control over the population of the planet and all spheres of his life. The final tool for managing a person should be a nanochip, or a laser nanomark applied to the forehead or right hand, which, according to the Revelation of the Holy Apostle John the Theologian (Rev. 13:15-18), will indicate the coming of the Antichrist. And the intermediate stage is just the assignment of digital identifiers (TIN, SNILS) to the population, the introduction of UEC and biometric passports, as well as the very collection and processing of personal data.

Privacy protection on Facebook

The only true option in this situation would be a complete rejection of social networks. But if this is not yet possible, you should at least try to keep the attack on your personal data to a minimum by adhering to the following rules:

Unfortunately, not only a social network can follow us, but also operating system- see for yourself how our personal data is used by Windows 10:

Take it, tell your friends!

Scalability, simplicity, openness

You can treat social networks in general and Facebook in different ways.
in particular, but from the point of view of manufacturability, this is one of the most interesting
projects. It's especially nice that the developers never refused to share
experience in creating a resource that can withstand such loads. This has a big
practical benefit. After all, the system is based on publicly available components,
which you can use, I can use - they are available to everyone.
Moreover, many of the technologies that were developed internally by Facebook
now published as open source. And use them, again, can
anyone who wants. The developers of the social network, whenever possible, used only
open technologies and the philosophy of Unix: every component of the system must be
as simple and productive as possible, while solving problems is achieved by
their combination. All the efforts of engineers are aimed at scalability,
minimizing the number of points of failure and, most importantly, simplicity. Not to be
unfounded, I will indicate the main technologies that are now used internally
Facebook:

I think it will be most interesting to hear how the project managed to
use the most common technologies. And there really are a lot
nuances.

What usually happens in 20 minutes on Facebook?

People post 1,000,000 links;

Tag friends on 1,323,000 photos;

Invite 1,484,000 acquaintances to events;

Send 1,587,000 messages to the wall;

Write 1,851,000 new statuses;

2,000,000 pairs of people become friends;

2,700,000 photos are uploaded;

10,200,000 comments appear;

4,632,000 private messages are sent.

PHP project

This begs the question: why PHP? In many ways - just "historically
It is well suited for web development, easy to learn and work with,
a huge range of libraries is available for programmers. Moreover, there is
huge international community. Of the negative aspects, one can name high
consumption random access memory and computing resources. When the amount of code became
too large, weak typing, linear growth were added to this list
connection costs additional files, limited opportunities for
static analysis and optimization. All this began to create great difficulties. By
For this reason, Facebook implemented a lot of improvements to PHP, including
bytecode optimization, improvements in APC (lazy loading,
locks, "heating" the cache) and a number of proprietary extensions (memcache client,
serialization format, logs, statistics, monitoring, asynchronous
event handling).

Scheme of forming a news feed

The HipHop project deserves special attention - it is a source code transformer
from PHP to optimized C++. The principle is simple: developers write in PHP,
which is converted to optimized C++. Implemented in the add-on
static code analysis, data type detection, code generation and more
other. HipHop also facilitates the development of extensions, significantly reduces
the cost of RAM and computing resources. With a team of three
programmers took a year and a half to develop this technology, in particular, it was
rewritten most of the interpreter and many extensions of the PHP language. Now
HipHop codes are published under an open source license, enjoy.

Facebook development culture

Move fast and don't be afraid to break things;

big influence of small teams;

be candid and innovative;

bring innovation back to the open source community.

MySQL Improvements

Now about the database. Unlike the vast majority of sites, MySQL is
Facebook is used as a simple store of key-value pairs. big
number of logical databases distributed over physical servers, But
replication is used only between data centers. Load balancing
is carried out by redistribution of databases by machines. Since the data
distributed practically randomly, no JOIN operations,
combining data from several tables are not used in the code. It has
meaning. After all, it is much easier to increase computing power on web servers,
than database servers.

Facebook uses almost unmodified source mysql,
but with their own partitioning schemes according to globally unique
identifiers and archiving based on the frequency of data access.
The principle is very effective, since most requests are for the most recent
information. Access to new data is optimized as much as possible, and old records
automatically archived. In addition, their libraries are used for
graph-based data access, where objects (graph vertices) can only have
limited set of data types (integer, string of limited length, text),
and connections (graph edges) are automatically replicated, forming an analogue of distributed
foreign keys.

Using Memcached

As you know, memcached is a high-performance distributed hash table.
Facebook stores "hot" data from MySQL in it, which significantly reduces
load at the database level. More than 25 TB used (just think about
figure) of RAM on several thousand servers with an average time
response less than 250 µs. Serialized structures are cached PHP data, and
due to the lack of an automatic mechanism for checking the consistency of data between
memcached and MySQL have to do it at the level program code. Main
the way to use memcache is to make multiple multi-get requests,
used to get data at the other end of the graph's edges.

Facebook is very actively engaged in finalizing the project on issues
performance. Most of the improvements described below have been included in
opensource version of memcached: port to 64-bit architecture, serialization,
multithreading, compression, memcache access via UDP (reduces
memory due to the lack of thousands of TCP connection buffers). In addition there were
Some changes have been made to the Linux kernel to optimize memcache performance.
How effective is it? After the above modifications, memcached is able to
perform up to 250,000 operations per second compared to the standard 30,000 - 40
000 in the original version.

Thrift Framework

Another innovative development of Facebook is the Thrift project. In fact,
it is a mechanism for building applications using multiple languages
programming. The main goal is to provide transparent technology
interactions between different technologies programming. Thrift Offers
developers a special interface description language, a static code generator,
and also supports many languages, including C++, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby,
Erlang, Perl, Haskell. The choice of transport is possible (sockets, files, buffers in
memory) and serialization standard (binary, JSON). Various types supported
servers: non-blocking, asynchronous, both single-threaded and multi-threaded.
Alternative technologies are SOAP, CORBA, COM, Pillar, Protocol Buffers,
but all have their own significant shortcomings, and this forced Facebook to develop
your own. An important benefit of Thrift is performance.
It is very, very fast, but even this is not its main advantage. With the advent of Thrift

Information about Facebook's interaction with the open source community of these and
other projects located on