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PHP Scales As Well As Java

Posted by michael on from the emperor-has-no-clothes dept.

mactari writes "Jack Herrington at the O'Reilly Network has had the audacity to claim that both PHP and J2EE architecture... are converging on the same design [regarding scalability]. Can it be that he's disproven the idea that 'Java scales and scripting languages don't' when he says, 'The idea that PHP does not scale is clearly false at the performance level'? Even if a little oversimplified (ignores horizontal scaling), it's an interesting comparison that takes a peek at the architecture beneath both hypes."

4 of 627 comments (clear)

  1. Some facts by vlad_petric · · Score: 5, Informative
    1. Scaling != performance. Scaling simply means that if you multiply the hardware by n you should be getting (ideally) close to throughput *n.

    2. DB is the bottleneck for most websites. A good connection pooling and caching system are critical. Ahem ... last time I checked, Java did considerably better than PHP in terms of both.

    3. As PHP was not designed as a multipurpose language, sometimes a PHP-only solution is simply a kludge. PHP's power is in writing webpages quickly, if you want to do, for instance, something more complex like charting in a web page (well, in a .PNG), things can get messy. Yeah, you can do that in C, but what's the point ?

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  2. Re:of course it does... by FattMattP · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tomcat is pretty slow in general. Why don't you try Resin?

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  3. J2EE != EJB by shaper · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the article, the author assumes that the J2EE application includes EJB's and from this assumption he builds in additional layers of overhead, especially with RMI calls to the EJB layer. His assumption is incorrect.

    If you really want performance in a J2EE app, you can stick to JSP's and servlets and limit the usage of EJB's. Still keep the presentation in the JSP layer and isolate the business logic in servlets. This approach is quite lean and scales hugely.

    When and how to use EJB's is just one part of J2EE application design.

  4. Get the most out of that aging single server by brlewis · · Score: 3, Informative

    Jetty running on that single aging server will blow the doors off of PHP. That's what I saw when I did some BRL benchmarking some time ago. Presumably you'll get similar results with JSP.