PHP Scales As Well As Java

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."

Comments

Some facts

[vlad_petric]

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 ?