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If you want to build a Facebook-like site where people can play games and share content, here's how to do it.

Chris Scholz, a systems engineer at Facebook, recently wrote on Quora how Facebook is built. Some of the information is pretty general, since a lot of what goes into building Facebook is proprietary. 

Here's a quick summary:

  • Facebook's front-end is primarily delivered through PHP, a popular scripting language for Web development. It runs on a compiling system similar or equal to HipHop for PHP.
  • Facebook relies on dozens of data centers and thousands of servers to handle things like its user database, Graph Search queries, and photo and video uploads.
  • Facebook designs a lot of its own hardware so the site can be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. It uses "load balancers to make sure that machines which are free take on more load." Facebook physically maintains all of those machines.
  • A lot of internal tools are written in Python or Bash.
  • Lots of back-end tools are written in C, C++, Java, or Perl.
Here's the whole answer:

Read Quote of Chris Scholz's answer to How is a Facebook-like site actually created from scratch? on Quora