"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Saturday, May 24, 2008

Erlang and the Facebook Chat Architecture

Seen on InfoQ re: the Facebook Chat Architecture...

Another challenge was delivering messages in real time. Facebook choose a technique whereby the client pulls updates from the server, similar to Comet's XHR Long Polling Process...

Facebook choose a combination of C++ and Erlang to implement clustered and partitioned subsystems. The C++ module is used to log chat messages, while Erlang "holds online users' conversations in-memory and serves the long-polled HTTP requests". epoll, a new system call introduced in Linux 2.6, was used to drive the Erlang module. Eugene states why the decision was made to go with Erlang...

because the problem domain fits Erlang like a glove. Erlang is a functional concurrency-oriented language with extremely low-weight user-space "processes", share-nothing message-passing semantics, built-in distribution, and a "crash and recover" philosophy proven by two decades of deployment on large soft-realtime production systems...

The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact of many real users hitting many machines by means of a "dark launch" period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends without a single UI element drawn on the page.

I am kind of amazed to see the attention Erlang has been given over the last couple two three years. OSCON in July here in Portland will have at least a three Erlang related sessions: a couple of tutorials and a presentation.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.