PHP scalability

Madwacker

Hi-

My company's website is currently coded with JSP (Java Server Pages) which I'm working on porting over to PHP 4.x . The senior architect who left the company but I talk to regularly told me that switching to PHP is a stupid mistake. He says that PHP cannot scale like a compiled (JSP) language can, and PHP isn't going to give the speed or efficiancy that JSP will.

My arguments are:
1) that we only have one in-house JSP guy who is also our DB/Server/Oracle/Java guy and he's full up on projects

2) I've seen large scale PHP sites, so I don't see why not to use it

3) It's easy to code and debug

4) It's fast

5) It will integrate with just about anything.

6) Doesn't eat up server memory like Java does

His arguments for JSP are:
1) Struts and tags

2) Compiled Language

3) JSP has matured since he wrote the site 3 years ago

Can anyone help me out here? I don't want to re-code the entire site only to have it not scale in months to come when we get a lot of traffic, and have that hanging over my head.

Thanks

stolzyboy

i believe he is being foolish, php will far outdo JSP, JSP is just a useless as java in general, anything you can do in JSP you can do in php faster, more efficiently and with better more speedy results, i wouldn't worry when you convert

Madwacker

That is how I feel as well, but I'd rather hear that from all of you who develop with PHP on large scale sites every day.

stolzyboy

to follow up on the but, i do develop on large scale sites every day, and i have seen no problems with php for server overhead, etc...and hey, take a look, this is a farily large scale site, and what is it done with hmmm....PHP, you say, but of course, it is a php forum, but still...

feldon23

Maybe not the best place for this question, but I've come here seeking advice on a similar issue.

I have already redone my site with just about every page written in PHP with the content coming out of a database. I'm pretty pleased with the results except for the fact that my webhost has not implemented any PHP caching solutions.

I am now backpedaling and considering doing all infrequently updated pages as HTML and then the admin interface (index_admin.php for example) re-creates the HTML file with the new content entered into the admin interface. It's a pain to redo all these pages and create admin panels for each page of the site (I had initially intended to create the admin panels later on) and would like to find a way to optimize my existing system if possible.

Is there a mechanism built into PHP that can check a timestamp before re-generating a page? I hate to have 500 visitors a day to a website each getting a newly-generated page (putting a huge load on the PHP compiler and thus the CPU) whose content has not changed in 3 weeks.

Are the client-side php caching programs like jpcache "good enough" to go live on a site that might get 1,000 hits a day?

Chimera

Why are you worried about caching on a site that's only getting 500 visitors per day? My company built a fairly large site for a company, and the site is averaging over 3000 unique visitors per day. It's hosted on a Verio VPS, so it's not like it's a fast dedicated box. The mysql DB for the site is over 100MB, and with proper optimization and indexing of the DB the site is just as fast as a static HTML version of the same site.

feldon23

Erm. Right now, the "database" is an INI file. I guess I need to go to MySQL. 🙂

Chimera

L Well, if you're reading in that "database" every time as a flat file, and working the data in arrays, that certainly might cause a little slowdown ;-)

MySQL rocks...use it.