Scalability of web application

Anon

We're in the design stage of an ecommerce site and are shopping around for reasonably priced development solutions. Our preference is to use open source (PHP, Apache, Linux) but we are concerned about scalability and robustness. Most of the places we have approached so far are pushing expensive solutions like Cold Fusion, Oracle, Iplanet, etc., and touting their scalability and robustness, and so forth. Having seen some impressive sites using PHP+Apache, we want to go this route but have the two above concerns. What can we do to ensure scalability and robustness using PHP+Apache? Are there any service providers using this combination for developing large scale ecommerce sites? If so, how may we contact them? Any and all information is appreciated.

-Doug

Anon

I'd like to know something about this too. I am already confident w/ CF, and .asp. From my recent painful experience I know php does not belong on NT/IIS/SQL Server, but hope that the whole open source on Linux/Apache/PHP is better. It definitely seems to be taking off and has alot of intelligent developers supporting it, but in terms of "professionl, mission-critical, scalable, robust e-commerce sites" I would like to see something more. url's, case studies, real-life testimonials, etc. I've seen some cool php sites, but have not run across anything "too big" yet. I know CF can be a resource hog, but any money you spend on licenses (which is not much in the grand scheme of things) is definitely saved on rapid development time.

Anon

I am also interested in this.

I have created some extremely robust implementations of RedHat/Apache, and some extremely robust PHP applications, but I have never tested them for load capabilities.

I would like to be involved with any testing that may be organised, so if anyone is interested, let me know.

For now, there is a site that is currently very popular in Australia, and I know for a fact that it gets pummelled.

http://www.goeureka.com.au/

It's the replacement for the Australian arm of Altavista. It's running Apache/1.3.9 PHP/3.0.14 on Linux.

If anyone finds any more sites please send them in.

James

Anon

We have been using PHP for 3 years now and I can say from my personal experience that it significantly outperforms ASP. We have transferred several sites from ASP to PHP, and the increase in performance was visible immediately -- while browsing through the site. Especially, when using PHP version 4 with Optimizer. These sites are receiving about 100,000 hits/day.

Important factor when comparing performance of dynamic, database-driven sites is in my opinion type of database connection. ODBC connections are perhaps the worst -- really slow. ASP+ADO is better. Nevertheless, we have achieved best results with PHP+mySQL, PHP+MS-SQL and PHP+Oracle.

PHP works fine in NT/W2K environment as well, we have used it with MS-SQL 7 and Oracle 8i without any major problems. Performance on Win2000 is usually better then on NT though, especially when running in ISAPI mode. Of course, the best performance is on UNIX machine…

Boris Belobrad
Belcom Bailey LLC
www.belcombailey.com