A small team within Facebook have been working on a project for the past 2 years which should help the social network cope with the massive levels of scaling they have to keep up with as a result of having over 350m users.

HipHop is a tool that transforms the site script (in Facebook's case, PHP) into a higher-level programming language that undertakes the neccesary functions, and is then turned back into PHP for outputting to the end user.

It has allowed the developers to reduce the web server CPU usage by 50%, ultimately saving on resources needed and being used. The site seems faster today, but whether this is just a placebo effect after being told the code is optimised is currently being debated in RA Towers.

[Facebook Developers]