Just saw this interesting article on what Facebook was doing to help increase the performance of their memcache servers. Because of the outstanding talk I saw from Brian Shire of Facebook back at PHP|Tek 2007 I at least understood what was being discussed here. Though understanding the idea and being able to “actually” do anything about it are to completely different things. But because of the great concept that is called open source that doesn’t matter.
First, if it wasn’t for the open source development that is going on, Facebook would not be able to have this great app to start with. They would either have to write their own or purchase a solution, which from others similar ones I’ve seen advertised, never seemed cheap. Extra costs like those can easily turn an extremely profitable company into one that is barely scraping by. That doesn’t even include all the other issues of relying on closed 3rd party apps, but I’ll save that rant for another day.
Second, Facebook is willing to share the wealth and have released their source modifications for the rest of the world to have (from the talk I knew they were directly contributing back to the project but I think this is more for the real power hungry people out there.) Now while I’ll never be lucky enough to have a project that would need this kind of power, it’s nice to know that if I did run into this issue I don’t have to reinvent the wheel or pony up a ton of cash.
This is just another great example of how open source can really help the greater good. Now, if only everyone would jump on this concept.
