PHP and Scalability (Again)

Thats pretty incredible. It says alot about the power of PHP. I believe that with ANY language you choose - it takes a proper system to make it work. So, to those who always complain about PHP - the same could be said of those using ASP, CFM, or JSP - when used improperly it will result in poor performance.

I especially liked the statistics about their traffic and yahoos traffic - both sites receiving that much traffic, yet still very powerful and scalable.

Thanks for the good read...

Peace,

Nate

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 at 02:34:51 GMT Link

One thing that I find extremely interesting is how server setup can make PHP applications either run into the ground or shine.

This also depends on the developer as well, sometimes a developer can write a PHP application and find that it will not scale due to the code logic and design.

Besides this there are definitely things to help in keeping the server(s) running great and fine tuned.

Squid-Cache is an excellent tool to keep the load down and having some HTTP Cache on the frontend.

PHP - Using MCache, APC and only compiling extensions that are needed. Also running it as an apache dso helps :)

Apache - Using a small webserver such as lighttpd to proxy image requests or static pages to will cut down apaches load. Loading only the modules needed. Tuning the performance settings properly for the environment that you will be encountering. Making the robots.txt file and excluding search engines from scanning your image directories.

MySQL - Performance tuning the configuration for your traffic amount and application needs, Rewriting queries that hit the slow-query log (this is not enabled by default), installing mtop (mtop.sf.net) and checking what mysql is doing during peak times to help optimize the configuration. Using indexes on fields that are routinely searched/limited by. etc...

I might have to write a blog entry later on all the different issues that normally come up as traffic increases!

Chris as always thanks for the link to this :)

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 at 12:20:16 GMT Link

There we go!!!

Yet another cool story about our lovely PHP.

But I still believed, to make a really good system, it does not mainly depend on the programmer, but combination of hard work from programmers, network guys and systems engineers.

It is not fair to blame PHP for all the mistakes in web apps.

But I'm wonder, why Friendster is so damn slow :)

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 at 08:35:53 GMT Link

I am trying to scale some of our servers and am finding the greatest problem we have is that after a good while our apache processes run at between 30-50 megs usage a process. This is quite the killer on the server. I have already started work to seperate the images and static content to a lighter server, however is there a way to track and findout which of our scripts, or files are causing apache to use the most amount of memory? This could be very helpful in cleaning up bloated code.

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 at 16:18:04 GMT Link

Stefan,

You could always install X-Debug and run a profiling script on this. Also with MySQL you could use a slow query log which might make your processes run longer.

Also you should only enable extensions in php and modules in apache that you are using. Anything else is just taking up extra memory.

You also might want to think about using apache 1.x and compiling php as a static module if you want some more speed :)

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 at 18:40:48 GMT Link

PHP Rocks!

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 at 06:03:37 GMT Link