I was put in charge of setting up a corporate intranet site with a database on the backend. My primary languages up until that time had been C and Perl. A friend had recommended PHP as something worth looking for. This was back in the day of PHP 3.0.5, and Java SDK 1.1 was a brand new thing. I decided against trying to build the web site in Perl, because back then mod_perl was pretty pokey, and I didn't want to write it in C because I wanted to use a langauge that produced easier to maintain code.
I tested tomcat and apache/php. I created a test database (anyone who knows me knows which database I was using, even back then...) with 10,000 or so randomly generated rows. My test machine was a P100 with 64 megs of RAM. At the time the latest and greatest was a P-II 266 with 256 Meg or so, so the test box wasn't that badly out of date.
With Tomcat, I had two issues, one was that I was lucky to get 1 page per second out of it, the other was that it died under load within an hour of commencing testing, and would die withing a couple of days of just being put online.
PHP, otoh, delivered something like 50 or so pages a second, and I could NOT kill the server with load, just make it go comatose until I removed the load, at which point it happily came back up.
Being an old C hacker, I found PHP to be an easy language to learn, and I wasn't tripped up by any of the common downfalls I've seen others fall into. Now, over half a decade later, I still don't think Java is ready for prime time. To quote Rasmus Lerdorf: "I think Java's a greate language, I just wish it worked"
