PHP Scalability and Performance
June 30th, 2004Troutgirl seems to have hit a hot button in her blog about Friendstar switching from JSP to PHP. This story has been picked up by a variety of bloggers. I originally saw it from Dynamically typed. Russell Beattie Notebook has some good discussion on the topic. Joe Grossberg talks about a redirection problems with the switch over and adds a link to Scott Andrew who talks about standards compliance of the new design. The consensus is that the new version is faster.
I hope that more information will come out about this. It would be nice to have another large scale case study alongside the Yahoo talks: Large Scale PHP, One year of PHP at Yahoo, and Making the case for PHP at Yahoo.
Another interesting case study is the Gaia Online discussion board. One of the largest forums on the net, on a recent check, it claims to have 70 million messages online with roughly 9,000 simultaneous users, and 750,000 registered users. The sitepoint post that brought this to my attention claims they are getting over 700,000 new posts per day. All of this running on a modified version of open source phpBB. Here is an interview with the board owner and founder.
The thread that talks about the modifications to phpBB to support Gaia Online’s volume is very interesting. It focuses mostly on query optimization. Not surprising in light of the previous discussion on PHP’s shared nothing architecture. If PHP encourages moving concurrency management to the database, then application scalability is going to become a matter of database scalability.
Switching from scalability to performance, John Lim talks about his experiences optimizing PHP code using xdebug. His article makes me want to check out xdebug, but I have too much on my plate right now to even risk getting near my PHP configuration. I am hoping that I will have time to do this before the upcoming WACT release.
All Posts
August 19th, 2004 at 10:21 am
PHP looks like a clear winner, but only time will tell.
September 4th, 2004 at 2:44 pm
I started with ASP years ago, I think PHP is a lot more powerful… I’d like to know which one would give better performance in high load application between PHP, JSP or ASP.NET… But I think any of them installed on a Unix server will be better than a Windows one.
December 3rd, 2004 at 4:17 am
I still work in PHP (more than a yr. now) . What I find here in India is that PHP still is considered as a simple Script tech. they consider php is unable to compete with J2EE which IS a more advanced.. but consider the Learning curve is far more sharp for J2EE and I don’t need to say anything about my Love PHP
But yes PHP still needs more application like variable stuff… which is required if you want same set of variables, values over an application…
Anyways… PHP is still Ruling.
August 1st, 2005 at 4:24 am
Thatks for the nice blog! Looks like PHP is winning over me. I am planning to start a portal and considering PHP or JSP.
October 6th, 2005 at 7:38 pm
I am a developer at gaiaonline.com and i am here to tell you that php scales. We now can easily support 30K simultaneous users signed in with no problem. After a few more optimizations we should be able to double and triple our load, without even adding any more hardware. We currently have about 300M posts on the site, with a few million more being added every day. Our site is now refactored and fine tuned, but the real trick to getting the most bang for your buck is to segregate the data into distinct services and build infrastructure that will allow you to transparently distribute the data load out across your servers. Divide and conquer!
October 6th, 2007 at 9:00 am
A thorough article to increase the performance of apache & php:
http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/survive_heavy_traffic_with_your_webserver