Re: PHP Decisions and Issues

Start doing some research and testing. Can PHP and MySQL do that? Sure. Are there better solutions? Sure. Too many factors go into decisions like this that's it not a simple email question and answer. For one, MySQL only supports transactions if you use InnoDB tables. How reliable are they? I don't know, you'll have to look into it. Do you have a good programmer? If you have a programmer that can write efficient code, then almost any program can be done in PHP. If you get a crappy programmer, then even a simple script can bring your server to it's knees with a little traffic. Questions like this are posed every day and there are ariticles all over out there that discuss the benifits and disadvantages. Do some searching on Google. Good luck. ---John Holmes... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Felker" <justin@down.cx> To: <php-general@lists.php.net> Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 11:39 AM Subject: [PHP] PHP Decisions and Issues > Hello to everyone. This email will probably be quite lengthy so please > bear with me. What I am asking is quite important to me, so I will try to > be as detailed as possible. > > I have spent the last hour pouring over this list's archive. I have found > some great information and a lot of you appear to be quite helpful. I just > want to thank everyone in advance for their help. If I have missed > something obvious or my question is redundant, then please point me towards > the appropriate links and I will read them right away. > > I, along with several other people am starting a business which will depend > heavily on its web presence. Unfortunately, I am in the all too common > position of having to make technical decisions that will have repercussions > on the future well-being of said business, with little to no budget. It is > crucial that the solution I pick, handle what we hope will become a very > large load in the not-to-distant future (whether this happens or not is a > question for another day, heh). To this end, I am very interested in using > the LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) approach. I have experience with all of > these technologies, but I am definitely not in a position to vouch for > their worthiness for use in a large scale application running beneath a > heavy load. > > To quantify LAMP's ability, is it appropriate for say, sites that generate > on the order of 5 million unique hits per day? If not, where would you > draw the line? At 500,000? Or 1 million? If so, how much higher could it > go possibly? 10 million? 20? > > Keep in mind that we have no problem heavily optimizing the application > (code tweaks, cacheing, etc). > > We looked into and even began development in JSP w/ Tomcat but found Tomcat > to be exceedingly unstable for production use (not that it was ever really > meant for it). And of course, the other available application servers > were well beyond our budget. Also, time constraints have forced us to look > for a faster-to-develop alternative. > > Just a couple of details about the application we intend to develop. It > will be very database intensive (many queries per page) and will also > provide real-time payment support (for which transactions are a must). > > So, what say you? Given all that I have said, is LAMP appropriate? Will > PHP and maybe even more importantly, MySQL be able to scale well? I have > no doubt that MySQL is fast, but just how scaleable is it? Will it die > beneath the kind of loads I have described? > > What would be *most* helpful to me is if you could provide web sites that > exist currently and experience this load and are using LAMP > (http://www.sourceforge.net?). > > I hope you are still with me! Thanks a lot for taking the time to read > this and I would appreciate greatly any help that can provide. > > Thanks. > > Justin > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php >