11:40 AM – Facebook, the social networking site many across the world know and love, have employed the help of the Mac Mini in a new way that looks to improve testing times for new apps. Thinking of the multitudes of people on the Facebook app using their favorite mobile device whether it be iPhone or iPad is as easy as a push of a button for the user, but behind the scenes it takes a network on a grand scale to do enough tests to simulate the number of users who use it day to day. With the insistence of Apple that apps for their devices be used and tested on Apple machines the Mac Mini was a home run for the guys at Facebook.
Using an absurd amount of these Minis in their data centers located internationally allows Facebook to not only test their apps but the actual amount of tests they are able to do allows them to identify any bugs that may arise with the release. “When you’re shipping an app to hundreds of millions of users, those one-in-a-million bugs can happen hundreds of times,” says Christian Legnitto the man who at the head of the engineering team at Facebook responsible for mobile app release. The once thought of as a simple machine, one may ask why not use one of Apple’s more powerful machines to run these tests? Boasting a quad-core 2.3GHz processor and 4GB of RAM, combining enough of these little wonders together packs quite a punch of computing power.
Source: Wired
