Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat. The new Facebook Chat uses Comet (long polling with a hidden iframe) against a custom web / chat server written in Erlang, designed to handle a launch to all 70 million users at once. It was tested using a “dark launch” period where live pages simulated chat request traffic without showing any visible UI.
Recent articles
- NVIDIA DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem - 14th October 2025
- Claude can write complete Datasette plugins now - 8th October 2025
- Vibe engineering - 7th October 2025