How Facebook Helped Box Get Much Faster

It's not too common to see an enterprise company use technology developed by a big consumer company to improve its performance.

But that's exactly what happened over the past 10 months with Box, an enterprise storage and collaboration app, when it migrated to Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), an open-source PHP virtual machine that provides significantly faster performance than the standard PHP runtime.

HHVM uses just-in-time (JIT) compilation, a computing process that allows faster program execution. With HHVM, Box's average request latency, or the time it takes to load server requests, has dropped by a factor of five, Box's software engineer Joe Marrama wrote in a blog post.

The speed increase has been clear across the board, he says, including its web app, mobile apps, and API. Box also expects to make "very large savings" in infrastructure costs over the coming years because of this, he says.

HHVM processes programs written in Hack and PHP. Its website says it runs much of the world's existing PHP, including the top 20 Github PHP frameworks. Its goal is to run all PHP code "existing in the wild," according to its website.