NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Shiflett]

--- Paul Reinheimer <preinheimer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Way to go Chris!

Thanks, Paul. :-)

I guess I missed all the fun, since I've been in the middle of nowhere in
Tennessee for the past several days. I logged on Friday to read all the
news about Friendster and the surrounding hoopla, so I wrote about it in
my blog. I guess if you write something that can be misinterpreted as "PHP
is better than Java," then you have a decent chance of getting covered by
Slashdot and a bunch of blogs, because it's nice and controversial.

Of course, I do think PHP is better than Java in a number of ways, but I
wasn't really arguing that at all, nor did I even say that Java doesn't
scale. My main point, which most Slashdot people seem to have missed
(surprise), is that scalability is not what's really important to most
people. You want your site to perform fast at your maximum load, whatever
that may be. If your site is slow as crap, do you think your users really
care that it scales well and will be just as slow (but no slower) with
twice as many users? Hell no! :-)

My (perhaps a bit goofy) example of a tractor and a truck was my attempt
at illustrating that. The tractor, which scales far better than the truck,
is a poor choice for speed. Speed is what really counts, and since
scalability is a relative measurement, it's somewhat useless in that
regard, especially by itself. Yes, if something scales really poorly
(http://shiflett.org/images/scalability_1.png), it's inevitably going to
slow down as your userbase grows, and with that slowdown being
exponential, it will matter. But, with multiple approaches to the same
problem, all of which can be made to scale, performance is so much more
important.

I guess I was also tired of hearing the false claims that Java scales and
PHP doesn't, since it's much easier to argue the other way around. Of
course, my argument that PHP naturally scales well doesn't take into
account that most of the applications we write use sessions, a database,
and the like. For a moderately complex application, PHP does not naturally
scale, and it's just as hard to make it scale as it is to make Java scale,
but I wasn't going to argue both sides. :-)

Chris

=====
Chris Shiflett - http://shiflett.org/

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