Facebook is one of those "special" circumstances. Facebook had to
choose between having 30,000 servers and 60,0000 servers. HipHop (the
compiled Facebook PHP binary) doesn't affect scalability as much as it
affects cost. The hard part for most database driven PHP applications
is what happens when you get past the 5 server (or so, VERY rough
number) cluster size. Then it becomes more about the architecture of
the application than it does about the individual programming language
the application is built in. J2EE web application servers provide a lot
of the tools to handle that in Java. However, there are plenty of
options available to help PHP applications scale just as well (and many
do).
Kevin Schroeder
Technology Evangelist
Zend Technologies, Ltd.
www.zend.com
www.twitter.com/kpschrade
www.eschrade.com
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 2:44 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Which scales better? J2EE, PHP, or CGIDEV2?
From: Kevin Schroeder
Not correct, IMHO. "Scalability" has virtually nothing to do with the
language.
If that's the case, then why did Facebook transform their PHP scripts to
C, and
compile it? It seems to me that runtime efficiency (performance) is the
first
key to scalability. If your applications require less CPU, then CPU is
less
likely to be a bottleneck. The box will handle more work.
But is there more to scalability, than language efficiency?
-Nathan
midrange.com
