Uhm... the article you linked to has some serious flaws. 1) it's from 2002. 2. It doesn't mention anything about java/jsp or tomcat so how can you claim it as a reference for php scalling better than tomcat?
Yahoo switched to PHP from their in-house scripting language.
There's a yahoo developer here that posts from time to time. He mentioned that Yahoo uses Java for a few things.
I agree with you. I prefer the Java/JSP/Servlet thing over PHP. It's easier to find cheap hosting for PHP than it is for Java though and I've had to use PHP a couple of times. It's not that bad but I wouldn't want to use it for a complicated site. Lunarpages.com has some affordable jsp hosting packeges. I think it's just 5 bucks more a month than they're normal package.
I can see building the business logic in java and using php to render the pages. I think there's a way to use php to call java objects. Not sure what version that's in or if it's supported by php4 which seems to be the most popular amongst web hosts.
I'm almost afraid to mention this, but one of the big reasons I like Java over PHP is performance. In my own tests I found Tomcat a lot faster than PHP. It wasn't a very scientific test. I had 2 pages about the same html size. The java based page used a controller servlet in my own mvc framework that loaded a header and footer file, did some cookie checking and even connected to a postgresql database on the same machine. The php file only inlcuded a header and footer. No mvc, no database access. The java page loaded about 2x as fast and I had about 2x the throughput of the PHP page.
The test probably wasn't technically fair. I used the latest tomcat build with the most current jdk (1.5). I didn't use apache as a frontend to Tomcat. For PHP I used the latest Apache 1.3 build with the latest mod_php and PHP 4.3.4. The reason for using this setup for PHP is that seems to be the most common among web hosting companies. Apache 1.3 seemed to be what was realling slowing things down because tests with apache as a front end for tomcat brought the numbers more inline. But from what I've seen most webhosts use 1.3 with php because of some threading issues with some php libraries and the apache 2 series of server.
I've also been able to do some neat things with threads in web applications with Java that have increased performance as well. I don't know if that's possible with PHP.
I did my tests not too long after there was the whole Friendster switching to PHP from JSP. I did some digging to get some info to see why the performance would be so bad for JSP. Turns out their architecture was all screwey. They had 50 servers hosting the site. Each server had a Tomcat instance and MySQL instance. They used some home brewed replication scheme to propogate the changes across the mysql instances. Any database write would have to be replicated to 49 other servers. That's gotta put some extra load on the db, especially since MySQL isn't that great for applications with a lot of updates. It's much better for mostly read sites. I remember someone also mentioning that they say a stack trace on a page and there was a Database.class with over 9,000 lines in it. They obviously didn't have a good multi-tiered architecture. That probably hurt their performance a lot. If they had their databases and app servers running on seperate servers they could have tuned each environment better for the task. Good connection pooling would also help, this is easy to setup since it's part of the servlet spec and all compliant servlet containers support it. Apparently the developers were authors of a JSP book which was supposed to give credibility to them being able to design a good JSP site. Unfortantely you need to know a lot more to develop a performant site. Most of the time the bottle neck isn't the application or the lanquage. It's the design or the database. A poorly designed database and queries usually going to bite you in the ass. Set up your data model correctly, do a bunch of explains on your queries to see how they perform and optimize them correctly, seperate your presentation logic from your business logic (this is more for maintainability than for performance), if you're running multiple servers seperate your appservers from your database and you can tune the os and memory for each function and you'll have a good platfo
The thing uses a stripped down version of the linux kernel. It doesn't need the whole OS. Linux is better suited to things like that because you can custimize it more. Maybe when OpenSolaris comes out next week people can start doing that with the Solaris kernel.
In any case, I don't think the deal has been finalized yet and contrary to what most people say on here, Sun isn't anti Linux. At least not to the extent some people portray them to be. They haven't really said anything worse than what other unix vendors have said, including IBM and HP. Sun uses linux in the support processor for their opteron servers, they sell and support RedHat and Suse Linux on their x86 servers, they have a linux desktop distro, they provide a lot of their software for the linux platform, they contribute to the linux kernel as well as other important oss projects, etc.
Ha! I got to see at least one page.... this is funny.
Goals
What am I trying to do here?
Keep my email service running and useful.
Keep my web service running too, since it's on the same machine.
If you want to keep your email service running it's probably not a good idea to submit your website which runs on the same machine as your mail server and on the same dsl line to slashdot.
I don't think he's going to have to worry about filtering spam for the next hour or so.
yeah but what applications are certified to run on FC4? Hell what applications are certified to run on FC3? The Inten and AMD changes are still months away. New chips and new distros don't get put into important production systems right away so Xen still has a long way to go before it's usable.
Do you know anything about Xen? The way Xen works you have to make some changes to the kernel to allow it to run on Xen. At least in the x86 world. So right now you're only option is to run an open source system on xen because you can recompile the kernel. Microsoft Dev Labs might have a version that runs on Xen but it's not publicly available. Red Hat, Suse and Sun have announced that they are going to be building Xen support into their kernel but that hasn't happened yet. Intel and AMD have announced that they will build the instructions necessary for the type of virtualization that Xen uses to work on their chips, but that won't be till the end of this year or early next year.
There's a lot of hype over Xen. It's neat but it's not there yet and it's not there yet because it needs changes that are outside of it's control.
Well, I guess now we know those christian music listening, family oriented, clean cut types love to pirate music. So much for family values. Servers you right for targetting your business to such a degenerate crowd.
"I still can't figure out how this gives the appearance of 3D. Can someone explain this for the physics-challenged?
Take a flashlight. Tie a string to the end, go out at night and spint it around really fast by the string. It looks like a circle. That's basically it.
" But how will they do it? The moment they announce the switch, all hardware sales stop. That's it. Half or more of Apple's income immediately stops because no one wants to buy depreciated hardware."
Sounds like it's going to roll out in phases. Probably the mac mini and the powerbooks. Apple might have something up it's sleeve in the way of emulating ppc for the new intel chips. They did this successfully when they switched to Power. One of the big hold ups when it comes to new apple hardware is the initial demand outweighs supply. One of the reason's has been IBM's failure to get Apple enough chips in time. Intel is a much bigger chip maker. This could make product release cycles much easier overall for apple.
"Exactly which commercially-available-in-2006 Intel ISA do you propose they use than? Itanic?"
Oh my god! don't even think that!!!! If apple switches to Itanic it's gonna suck. Although it makes more sense than x86 I don't even want to think about it. They should let that chip sink, make a movie about it and get a canadian to sing a song about it.
I remember reading an interview with a google guy. There were using RedHat 7.3 I think. They had customized it quite a bit. As for the money they spent on RedHat according to the article it was something along the lines of "every time I go to Staples I might pick up a box".
Yeah that all sounds good until CentOS comes along and offers a free alternative built on the RHEL sources for those of us that don't want to spend thousands of dollars per server per year on every box running red hat whether we want support for it or not.
Some of the complaints regarding Sun's storage solutions are that they are so mixed up. Probably from rebranding solutions from various vendors throughout their lines. Maybe StorageTek can bring some more coordination making customers that have to use multiple lines of Sun storage have an easier time sorting through and administering them?
"From what i've read, Sun's Opteron line is just rebranded Newisys servers."
That's true of the current models (v20z and v40z) which sun is selling quite well. I remember reading that Sun is AMD's biggest Opteron customer.
Sun is also working on a new line of Opteron servers codenamed Galaxy. These are completely in house designs. Andy Bechtolsheim, who was employee number one at Sun has returned to Sun through the aquisition of Kealia. There's been some talk about the Galaxy line of servers but not much information. Andy seems to be a very smart guy and the type of person you want to be bringing new innovations to the company. When he was at Stanford he built his own workstation so that he wouldn't wait for shared computer time on campus servers. He also worked on the first sun workstations. Like most other Opteron and x86 server vendors, Sun has been positioning their opteron servers as edge of network platforms but their Galaxy class line is rumoured to be for more important workloads that their workgroup ultrasparc servers are marketted at.
The w1100z and w2100z worstations from what I understand, were designed in house. There's a good review of the designs here
If Sun is smart they'll do what IBM does and accidentally leave extra stuff in the delivery:
Truck Driver: Hey wait, you didn't unload all your stff.
ST Customer: Only thing left in the truck are a few galaxy servers and JES software packages. All we ordered were ST storage arrays.
Truck Driver: You're m last delivery and all I know is I gotta bring back the truck empty and clean so I can either dump the stuff or you can take it. Your choice.
Before websphere became popular they were trying to give it away to people that would buy servers.
This isn't that bad a move. Sun has a ton of cash and needs to start making some investments with it. Sun's storage solutions have been all over the map and hopefully the aquisition of StorageTek will solve that problem. With StorageTek and Tarantella they've really made some good moves in providing a full solution to future enterprise computing needs.
Ever since sarbanse oxly, storage has been a gold mie business. People need to store insane amounts of information now.
What sun really should figure out how to do though is do to storage what it's doing to servers with opteron processors. Otherwise that storage company Larry Ellison is funding is going to eat everybody's lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo switched to PHP from their in-house scripting language. There's a yahoo developer here that posts from time to time. He mentioned that Yahoo uses Java for a few things.
I can see building the business logic in java and using php to render the pages. I think there's a way to use php to call java objects. Not sure what version that's in or if it's supported by php4 which seems to be the most popular amongst web hosts.
I'm almost afraid to mention this, but one of the big reasons I like Java over PHP is performance. In my own tests I found Tomcat a lot faster than PHP. It wasn't a very scientific test. I had 2 pages about the same html size. The java based page used a controller servlet in my own mvc framework that loaded a header and footer file, did some cookie checking and even connected to a postgresql database on the same machine. The php file only inlcuded a header and footer. No mvc, no database access. The java page loaded about 2x as fast and I had about 2x the throughput of the PHP page.
The test probably wasn't technically fair. I used the latest tomcat build with the most current jdk (1.5). I didn't use apache as a frontend to Tomcat. For PHP I used the latest Apache 1.3 build with the latest mod_php and PHP 4.3.4. The reason for using this setup for PHP is that seems to be the most common among web hosting companies. Apache 1.3 seemed to be what was realling slowing things down because tests with apache as a front end for tomcat brought the numbers more inline. But from what I've seen most webhosts use 1.3 with php because of some threading issues with some php libraries and the apache 2 series of server.
I've also been able to do some neat things with threads in web applications with Java that have increased performance as well. I don't know if that's possible with PHP.
I did my tests not too long after there was the whole Friendster switching to PHP from JSP. I did some digging to get some info to see why the performance would be so bad for JSP. Turns out their architecture was all screwey. They had 50 servers hosting the site. Each server had a Tomcat instance and MySQL instance. They used some home brewed replication scheme to propogate the changes across the mysql instances. Any database write would have to be replicated to 49 other servers. That's gotta put some extra load on the db, especially since MySQL isn't that great for applications with a lot of updates. It's much better for mostly read sites. I remember someone also mentioning that they say a stack trace on a page and there was a Database.class with over 9,000 lines in it. They obviously didn't have a good multi-tiered architecture. That probably hurt their performance a lot. If they had their databases and app servers running on seperate servers they could have tuned each environment better for the task. Good connection pooling would also help, this is easy to setup since it's part of the servlet spec and all compliant servlet containers support it. Apparently the developers were authors of a JSP book which was supposed to give credibility to them being able to design a good JSP site. Unfortantely you need to know a lot more to develop a performant site. Most of the time the bottle neck isn't the application or the lanquage. It's the design or the database. A poorly designed database and queries usually going to bite you in the ass. Set up your data model correctly, do a bunch of explains on your queries to see how they perform and optimize them correctly, seperate your presentation logic from your business logic (this is more for maintainability than for performance), if you're running multiple servers seperate your appservers from your database and you can tune the os and memory for each function and you'll have a good platfo
Yeah... just like remote controls were able to mutate us into being able to control electronic equipment with our minds.
I used to use asdf.com all the time too.. Then one day I decided to see if it actually existed. This is a funny read. :)
In any case, I don't think the deal has been finalized yet and contrary to what most people say on here, Sun isn't anti Linux. At least not to the extent some people portray them to be. They haven't really said anything worse than what other unix vendors have said, including IBM and HP. Sun uses linux in the support processor for their opteron servers, they sell and support RedHat and Suse Linux on their x86 servers, they have a linux desktop distro, they provide a lot of their software for the linux platform, they contribute to the linux kernel as well as other important oss projects, etc.
What was the guy thinking? Posting a link to his server hosted on his DSL line? By the way the new netcraft pages look cool!
yeah but what applications are certified to run on FC4? Hell what applications are certified to run on FC3? The Inten and AMD changes are still months away. New chips and new distros don't get put into important production systems right away so Xen still has a long way to go before it's usable.
There's a lot of hype over Xen. It's neat but it's not there yet and it's not there yet because it needs changes that are outside of it's control.
Well, I guess now we know those christian music listening, family oriented, clean cut types love to pirate music. So much for family values. Servers you right for targetting your business to such a degenerate crowd.
Take a flashlight. Tie a string to the end, go out at night and spint it around really fast by the string. It looks like a circle. That's basically it.
and if you shake it, you get a nice wintery effect
Etch-A-Sketch
Sounds like it's going to roll out in phases. Probably the mac mini and the powerbooks. Apple might have something up it's sleeve in the way of emulating ppc for the new intel chips. They did this successfully when they switched to Power. One of the big hold ups when it comes to new apple hardware is the initial demand outweighs supply. One of the reason's has been IBM's failure to get Apple enough chips in time. Intel is a much bigger chip maker. This could make product release cycles much easier overall for apple.
Oh my god! don't even think that!!!! If apple switches to Itanic it's gonna suck. Although it makes more sense than x86 I don't even want to think about it. They should let that chip sink, make a movie about it and get a canadian to sing a song about it.
Profit - sue the people responnsible for leaking the info :)
I remember reading an interview with a google guy. There were using RedHat 7.3 I think. They had customized it quite a bit. As for the money they spent on RedHat according to the article it was something along the lines of "every time I go to Staples I might pick up a box".
Yeah that all sounds good until CentOS comes along and offers a free alternative built on the RHEL sources for those of us that don't want to spend thousands of dollars per server per year on every box running red hat whether we want support for it or not.
No, they're available for CDDL projects, which are FOSS projects whether you or the people at IBM want to acknowledge that.
Some of the complaints regarding Sun's storage solutions are that they are so mixed up. Probably from rebranding solutions from various vendors throughout their lines. Maybe StorageTek can bring some more coordination making customers that have to use multiple lines of Sun storage have an easier time sorting through and administering them?
That's true of the current models (v20z and v40z) which sun is selling quite well. I remember reading that Sun is AMD's biggest Opteron customer.
Sun is also working on a new line of Opteron servers codenamed Galaxy. These are completely in house designs. Andy Bechtolsheim, who was employee number one at Sun has returned to Sun through the aquisition of Kealia. There's been some talk about the Galaxy line of servers but not much information. Andy seems to be a very smart guy and the type of person you want to be bringing new innovations to the company. When he was at Stanford he built his own workstation so that he wouldn't wait for shared computer time on campus servers. He also worked on the first sun workstations. Like most other Opteron and x86 server vendors, Sun has been positioning their opteron servers as edge of network platforms but their Galaxy class line is rumoured to be for more important workloads that their workgroup ultrasparc servers are marketted at.
The w1100z and w2100z worstations from what I understand, were designed in house. There's a good review of the designs here
StorageTek I think also has about $2 billion in cash and short term investments. They could use the cash the get with StorageTek to buy Novel :)
Truck Driver: Hey wait, you didn't unload all your stff.
ST Customer: Only thing left in the truck are a few galaxy servers and JES software packages. All we ordered were ST storage arrays.
Truck Driver: You're m last delivery and all I know is I gotta bring back the truck empty and clean so I can either dump the stuff or you can take it. Your choice.
Before websphere became popular they were trying to give it away to people that would buy servers.
Apparently, we should be eeingn opensolaris in the next month or so???
Ever since sarbanse oxly, storage has been a gold mie business. People need to store insane amounts of information now.
What sun really should figure out how to do though is do to storage what it's doing to servers with opteron processors. Otherwise that storage company Larry Ellison is funding is going to eat everybody's lunch.