Right now the global social networking atmosphere is dominated by one name and i.e. Facebook. With over 750 million user-base, according to eBizMBA Rank, in a list published in September 2014. SynapseIndia founder Shamit Khemka describes use of php as the base for most of the social networking websites.

1. PHP Rules the roost:
Ask Facebook
By Shamit Khemka

2. The best knows the best
Right now the global social networking atmosphere is
dominated by one name and i.e. Facebook. With over 750
million user-base, according to eBizMBA Rank, in a list published
in September 2014, Facebook is followed by names like Twitter,
LinkedIn, Pinterest etc., and many more. One prime point to
notice in this list is that most of the big names such as Facebook,
Pinterest, etc., use PHP as the base of their site. This makes it
necessary to cultivate why PHP is so very befitting for social
networking sites.

3. Listen what Facebook Engineer Says
The debate of why PHP and social networking are so much fond of one
another has been finely answered by a Facebook engineer named
Yishan Sparklepants Wong. He said the prime reason has always been
the incumbent inertia that comes with PHP. The engineers at Facebook
avoided the basic loopholes of PHP with patches and customization of
codes.
As because PHP is very much flexible in this regards this was the prime
choice in this regards. It is always suggested that moving the whole
codebase to some other language is not a great idea and Facebook
being so very successful never wanted that in first part. This made it
more inclined towards writing fresh components in languages like C++,
Python, etc. that complies with the PHP base of Facebook.
This had been ensured by the formulation of RPC framework. With this
framework one has got the freedom of avoiding those subcomponents
that does not establish fine tune with the core language PHP. As the
evolution is going on strongly with PHP, the process will be continued.

4. PHP Preferred but there is more to
Facebook?
• With just PHP in the hand even Facebook would not have been gone far
and this had prompted them to look for more innovation. Here are some
of the fine names which are adding value to the Facebook’s functionality.
• Memcached: It is primarily a distributed memory caching system. In the
industry it is very popular and Facebook and quite a few other top sites
use it. This is used as a caching layer between the web and MySQL
servers. Quite a lot of customization has been done over Memcached by
Facebook. Facebook runs huge number of Memcached servers for its
need. All these efforts are PHP dependent.
• HipHop for PHP: PHP is a slow language for running standalone in server
environment. HipHop makes it happen and in the process helps Facebook
as it depends on PHP for content distribution. HipHop is developed by
Facebook at an expense of 18 months.
• Haystack: It is the object storage handler part which takes care of billions
of uploaded photos in Facebook. Based on PHP it has been developed by
Facebook.

5. Conclusion
Although there are custom features that make Facebook what it
is, PHP, is the lifeblood of its existence.
And not just Facebook there are many other names can be listed
in this context. If someone is intending to start their own social
networking site consultation service, collaboration with experts in
PHP website development from India can fetch the desired
results.

6. Thank you for Watching it!