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Meta’s Software System Blueprint: Unveiling the Architecture of Social Graphs, Identity, and RTB (2)
From PHP to Presto, Thrift to React — How Meta’s software systems evolved into one of the world’s most optimized engineering stacks through relentless iteration, hardware-software co-design, and atomic-scale performance tuning.
Disclosure: I use GPT search to collection facts. The entire article is drafted by me.
Introduction
Facebook/Meta’s technological evolution is nothing short of a textbook in internet engineering. What began as a dorm-room PHP project now handles 5 trillion requests daily across 2 active billion users — a feat achieved through radical reengineering rather than revolutionary overhauls. Facebook’s relentless drive for performance didn’t stop at mere software optimizations — it extended to the hardware and communication layers as well. This journey reveals how constraints breed innovation, technical debt fuels progress, and web-scale systems demand atomic-level optimizations.
