PHP Multithreaded?

Anon

I run a site on ASP that resides on Windows machine that I'm looking to move to PHP/mySQL. We currently do about 60,000 unique visitors a month and 12 million page views. We have two dual-processor machines that run the site.

We I asked our system admin about switching to PHP, he said that PHP was based on Perl and the latest version of Perl isn't fully multi-threaded to utilize the dual processors effectively, when on the other hand ASP does.

I want to move over to PHP/mySQL, but this is the problem I run into. What are your thoughts on the scalability of PHP and if PHP isn't the right platform, what would be the next level? Is PHP a proper multithreaded environment?

Thanks in advance,

Masterhouse.

Anon

Your sysadmin is misinformed.

PHP ordinarily is installed as a module on a Web server that may or may not be multithreaded. Multithreading is not necessarily smarter/better/faster than the preforking model employed by Apache 1.x., which is why Apache 2.x allows a well-informed sysadmin to choose either preforking or multithreading, depending on the needs of the site. The assignment of tasks to multiple processors is the responsibility of the operating system, not the scripting language or the Web server.

And PHP is not based on Perl -- never has been. There's not a line of Perl code in it.

PHP is highly scalable, and is used by many sites that are much, much larger than yours. I know of a number of fairly large newspaper sites, turning upward of a million pageviews per day, that are running PHP.

balsdorf

Take a look at the case studies from Zend.
http://www.zend.com/zend/cs/

Yes zend does have a vested interested in getting you to switch, but they do have some good info.