http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/real-world-web-application-benchmarking/203367363919 Facebook has build custom web-app testing framework to test server performance. Read it, especially the section on why “standard” SPECxxx benchmarks are not a good measure of anything. Also, ready about performance-per-watt, as this is really important for modern data centers.
http://framethink.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/how-facebook-ships-code/ Notes about facebook internal PM process (release, builds, QA, deployments, management, etc) … Interesting that they manage to do their work like a small startup team, even thought they are #1 site on the Net and have ~ 2K employees.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/the-facebook-data-center-faq-page-3/ article about facebook infrastructure, the 3rd page contains links to different videos and presentations by facebook engineers
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 A great presentation [from google] about how people interact socially in the real life and how current social networks represent them. (Needs about 30 min to read)
http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebooks-memcached-multiget-hole-more-machines-more-capacit.html also see http://dormando.livejournal.com/521163.html Describing some problems with performance/scalability you may have if you partition/shard your data by hash. ( that’s what memcached does.) You may hit the cpu bound limit from the amount of requests that few very popular keys receive. Currently, there is now common way around this (perhaps because very very few sites scale to the point when this becomes an issue )
http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-million-page-view-month-facebook-ror-app
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/08/12/facebook-search-search-for-social-networks/ facebook uses mysql, I didn’t know