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 ?

Re:Some facts

[vlad_petric]

But connection pooling scales much, much better than persistent connections ... Especially when each user makes only a couple of requests.

They scale differently

[digidave]

Java scales up very well, PHP scales down better.

If you're trying to run on a budget where you can't add a ton of servers and are limited to aging technology, Java will not scale to that environment very well. PHP can do quite well there.

Sun isn't interested in that market, which is a shame because there are a lot of companies still cutting budgets. I'd love to buy a server newer than a P2 1ghz, but it's not going to happen until at least next fiscal and even then, unlikely. We don't all work for technology companies who understand or care.

IF you accept the underlying assumptions...

[Dr. Bent]

...then yes, it does. However:

"PHP can use the database as the back-end session store."

and

"The ideal multi-server model is a pod architecture, where the router round-robins each of the machines and there is only a minimal session store in the database."

are pretty tough assumptions to swallow. Storing session state in a database only works when you have a small amount of session state to store. Otherwise the database quickly becomes the bottleneck for any operation you need to perform. The alternative is that you have to have your session state distribuited in a cluster, which is something that, AFAIK, you cannot do in PHP. You can, however, do it Java. In fact, some of things that JBoss is trying to do will make session replication across a cluster fairly easy.

PHP can be very useful. I think PHP as a view layer sitting on top of a a J2EE controller and object model would be a wonderful idea. But to say "PHP scales as well as Java" is a huge oversimplification of the extremely complex problem that is enterprise computing.

where I stopped reading

[BigGerman]

"A page showing ten fields from twenty objects would make two hundred RMI calls before it was completed."
Sure if it was coded by former vb guy w/o a clue.
Even naive J2EE applications I saw would be smart enough to use a view object (containing all twenty business objects and their fields) to come back from the buisness layer in one call.
A person to use argument like this about J2EE scalability has no credibility whatsoever.

Hrm

[Etriaph]

The issue with PHP is not whether or not it scales as well as Java, but whether or not it's useful in a real-world application. In my opinion, it isn't that useful.

PHP offers us no way to build an application server (unless you write one in C or C++ and send commands to it via a cli or directly through sockets). If you embed Tomcat in your application server, you can simply create contexts and mount them with mod_jk. Quite simply, you can take any server that you've written in Java and web enbale it fairly quickly. PHP lacks persistence, and I'm not talking about sessions.

Let's say that we want to add a request to our application from the web. With Java I can toss the request on a queue which a thread picks up and balances to several other worker threads who interpret the request and works with it. With PHP I would have to enter data into a flat file, or a database, and have a cronjob setup to run every minute or so and do something with data in the database. Even then, at that point, I can only have one thread unless I want to mix and match several cronjobs to run at seperate times (or unless I want to fork the process off very uncleanly using exec() or system()). In any case, does PHP scale as well as Java? Maybe, I'd need to do more tests. Is it nearly as useful? No, not right now, probably not ever. Unless you are willing to write your own custom PHP module in C and play with PHP that way, I think big jobs should be left to the heavyweight in this discussion.

Re:Here's why...

[AstroDrabb]

VB is a very powerful language that many people use to build enterprise class applications

Oh my gosh, my side is splitting from laughing so hard. You have no clue what enterprise class means. I am a developer for a fortune 500 company with 110,000+ employees. VB does not scale. VB does not even do true threads. It only supports apartment threading. VB does not support one ounce of object oriented programming. A class in VB is NOT a real class. It does not support polymorphism, inheritence, etc. Try to write an large enterprise class application with many developers in VB and then you will know what I am talking about. Once an applications gets to so many thousands of lines of code, OO techniques become invaluable. VB is procedural and just doesn't cut it. VB is for kiddies or as Billy boy would say, "hobby" programmers. Can I create a class and inherit from it? No. Writting an application with a few thousand lines of code with maybe five developers does not make it enterprise class. The file handling is a joke. The syntax is joke. VB came in handy for a quick way to plan out a GUI. Plain and simple. Please tell us what "Enterprise" grade applications you have made with VB? Hell, name one "enterprise" grade application available in VB? Is SQL Server written in VB? Is Oracle?

and don't even think about reminding people here at Slashdot that Perl has been dead for a few years.

Are you even a developer? Comments like this make me doubt it. Look at the URL when you are in /. See that nice .pl on the end? That is perl. It is pretty funny that /. running perl can handle the load that many other sites out there just crock on, hence the term ./ing. There are still tons of perl sites out there. Perl is also indespensible when it comes to text processing or admin related tasks. Just because you don't have the ability to learn any language other then VB, doesn't me the rest of the world can't.

But show off something better and easier? Sacrilege.

Thats part of the problem right there. If you dumb down a language too much such as VB, you loose all the power features that comes with a language such as C, C++. It also contributes to all the headaches in the world of IT when you have tons of piss poor code written by sup-par "programmers" that cannont grasp anything harder then VB. Trusting a VB-only developer to write an Enterprise class application is like having the "tire change boy" be your machanic. It is a stupid choice to make.