On PHP and Scaling

jpkunst writes "Chris Shiflett at oreillynet.com summarizes (with lots of links) a discussion about scalability, brought about by Friendster's move from Java to PHP. Chris argues that PHP scales well, because it fits into the Web's fundamental architecture. 'I think PHP scales well because Apache scales well because the Web scales well. PHP doesn't try to reinvent the wheel; it simply tries to fit into the existing paradigm, and this is the beauty of it.' (The article is also available on Chris' own website.)"

Comments

jsp is a bad idea, but Java is not

[ahmetaa]

if someone wants to produce a high performance web site in Java, jsp is a bad choice. use Velocity - pure java objects - a decent DB abstraction mechanism (Hibernate, iBatis). . Plus, i used php, ok, it is easy to use and can be preferred small to medium size web sites. but call me biased, it is nowhere near the elegance of java.

Re:Author seems to live in a vacuum

[lamz]

I don't see any part of the article addressing how PHP can benefit the developer facing real issues of large scale web development (such as the need for caching systems on high volume websites, or the maintence challenge of larger code bases on complex sites).

The article doesn't mention it, but Smarty is an excellent PHP library that implements, among other things, caching. I have used it extensively with excellent results.

Re:Yahoo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's only partially true. Yahoo uses C/C++ for almost all backend development. PHP is used mostly for what it's good at: Simple web frontends that call on extensions written in C and C++ to do most of the heavy lifting, or access backend systems written in C/C++.

Yahoo is very much a C/C++ shop first and foremost - PHP is used as a template system (alongside several proprietary systems) to allow easy modification of high level behaviour.