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by ForHackernews 1319 days ago
I think this article underestimates the inefficiencies in large, centralized systems where efficiency is not a goal, and incentives are weighted against it.

Famously, Facebook's iOS app is over 100 MB[0] and for Android, their engineers hacked the Dalvik VM because they had so many class definitions they were overflowing a 5MB buffer just for the definitions - and then, staggeringly, they bragged about this obscenity.[1]

I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app.

[0] https://www.cio.com/article/230043/why-is-facebooks-ios-app-...

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood...
1 comments
ilyt 1319 days ago
From what I've seen their datancenter stuff is way more competent

>I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app.

Uh, of course they are running their own datacenters, they are one of biggest sites on net, outsourcing infrastructure to cloud makes no goddamn sense to them

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csande17 1319 days ago
From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app over a 3G data connection" to get people to cut down on bloat.

Overstaffing and ship-the-org-chart syndrome leads to ginormous app bundles on the client and 7000 microservices on the server.

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ilyt 1318 days ago
It does look like many of the "hey, look at what cool things we do in our datacenter level infrastructure" stems from the stuff they run on that being overly complicated.
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ForHackernews 1319 days ago
Wikipedia is one of the largest sites on the internet, and (to my knowledge) they are not running their own data centers.

> outsourcing infrastructure to cloud

Paying for AWS or building a data center are not the only two options. There are many co-location providers, there are dedicated firms with the expertise to run a data center for you...

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