Re: Why PHP ? - devil's advocate

Let me explain a bit here. We do web application development. One remaining project is running on NT. The rest are on Linux/PHP. The NT one is being converted, but more because we are more proficient in PHP (and it's more flexible) than VBScript. The stability of these particular servers has been *quite* good, actually. I've come from a company in the past that had ~200 NT web servers. Yes, they had problems. *Some* sets of servers had severe problems, *some* were good as gold. That right there probably says something - it's why I said it before - windows can be a crapshoot. That's my experience. For the people who have Windows machines that are up and running, it's gotta be great. Our 10 box NT server farm has been down 3 times for upgrades (drives, CPU, firewall) in the past year. Probably 8 hours of downtime for the year. On the other hand, I've seen Nt boxes that *needed* to be reboot every week. We probably all have at some point. The point of all this is that it's fine for some and not others. I've still spent more time compiling and debugging install problems with various linux libraries and programs than I have administering and rebooting the NT machines, on this project. Others, that wasn't the case. I said it before, and I'll say it again - the positives AND negatives of each platform need to be taken into account. *overall* I'd say that linux is a superior choice in most scenarios. But 'one size fits all' answers never seem realistic to me. The whole thread was started with someone asking for 'real' evidence one way or the other about PHP. This has now devolved into 'linux/ms' debating, which I'd like to stop. I use both, respect people who use any plaform, as long as they're good at what they do. Joe Stump wrote: > > Whether I'm running Windows or Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris, > > my time is valuable. If I can install something in Windows > > in 10 minutes, rather than hours or days of tracking down compilation > > issues, then Windows becomes more attractive. The > > positives and negatives of each system need to be taken into > > account, but I think that for *many* people, the perception > > of difficulty in compiling/using open source stuff becomes the reality. > > And how much of your valuable time do you spend keeping those NT machines up > and running. I've spent a total of 30 minutes at the CoLo in the last month > and that was to replace bad hardware. > > Like I said before the time spent setting up a rock solid solution easily > outways the time of upkeep with an unstable NT solution - and I've seen MANY > people spend WEEKS getting those up and running because they don't always work > as well as you seem to think they do. > > --Joe