Just when you thought your app was in “the cloud” … someone showed you that you’re still on a VPS. Everything’s in the box…. DBMS, some scripting framework your web guy likes, maybe some plugins and things. You’ve got a lamp server running on there, some python stuff… ruby on rails, ruby off the rails, and your ex cube-farm neighbor Jim’s whole crazy train of UI experiments. MySQL’s SuSQL? Whos’ SQL is that? Want to throw more compute power at the problem? OK! Service-oriented operators are standing by!

System Requirements:

• Linux…
• or.. Unix if you prefer
• not running a non *nix based operating system

Senseless promotional point system options:

• +10 cloud points if you’re a Debian/Ubuntu user.
• +20 cloud points if you compile your own kernels.
• +30 cloud points if you’re from California.
• +40 cloud points if you’re from The Bay.
• +100 cloud points if you managed to rack up 100 cloud points just now.

Other Requirements

• Beta Participation with a tolerance for betavailability.
• SCRAPERS is a release candidate, so is your app, probably… anyway.

What happens inside the SCRAPER CLOUD…

1. Normally what happens in the cloud stays in the cloud, but I will tell you anyway…
2. Your server, VPS, appliance or application (let’s call it an app) is placed into a Scalable Cloud Response Architecture Platform Elasticator (SCRAPE).
3. Once inside the SCRAPE, your app is replicated and privately analyzed by a service-orientation analyzer engine (SOAE)… well… it’s more like a scraper bike peddled by a service-oriented architect.
4. Scalability is achieved by dividing your app into persistent data and elastic process service-layers that are provisioned by an Economy of Autoscale Elasticator Engine (EoAEE!!!!!!!).
5. Your app will continue to get comfortable in the SCRAPE, reaching more efficiency as time goes on.
6. Once your app has been service-oriented, your app will have learned to autoscale as needed and is ejected into the production cloud environment.
7. Any SCRAPE’d app is compatible with Amazon Machine Images as well as Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and Eucalyptus.

Promotional Service Rates for qualified apps (beta)

• $1.60 per hour per SCRAPE standard (supports most midsized developing and production apps)
• $3.30 per hour per SCRAPE VIP GOLD (livin’ large for famous apps)
• additional compute nodes “pedants” can optionally be purchased as needed for $0.025 per hour (according to the optimized load average plan)
• Network bandwidth and additional IPs: MARKET

Ask about premium pricing here.

Facebook is written mostly in PHP, which generally scales well for most sites. Large scale web sites can greatly reduce memory resource utilization as well as CPU resource utilization by eliminating unused and inefficient code instructions.

Although PHP is considered to be a scripting language, PHP’s parser does in fact compile code before it is processed by the Zend Engine. Opcode caching allows compiled PHP code to be shared and recycled in memory, rather than compiling the PHP source on the fly. Opcode caching is already available in Zend Server’s community edition and will be available when PHP6 is released.

HipHop takes a much more aggressive approach to performance optimization by translating the source code into C++ which can be compiled into more machine specific instructions. Not only does HipHop compile the source code into a more system friendly language, it also rewrites your code to be more efficient. Through static binding, scripty system calls and functions such as eval() are eliminated and loosely defined types are tightened up to meet specific runtime requirements. Here is an illustration of how HipHop optimizes PHP:

According to Facebook’s Senior Engineer Haiping Zhao, HipHop reduced Facebook’s CPU overhead by 50%!

HipHop will be released tonight under the open PHP license.

I got this error when trying to configure php 5.2.6:

configure: error: xml2-config not found. Please check your libxml2 installation.

I’m using Debian and it showed that I had libxml2 installed (and it was the latest version).

It turns out that the latest stable version of libxml2 doesn’t include a file named xml2-config. I suppose I could have linked that file to the config file that the stable version of libxml2 uses, but the easy fix is to just install the newer development version of libxml2 using the following command:

apt-get install libxml2-dev

That’s all I needed!