Re: [PHP] PHP Decisions and Issues
I just want to thank everyone for their responses. I do realize this was not exactly a question that could be answered as such but I still wanted to hear some people that have had personal experiences dealing with similar issues. FYI, I have read many websites that attempt to answer this question in one way or another, but I feel that the details I can get from places such as this mailing list are much better. Anyways, to focus on one question I had asked, can anyone provide with websites that run using LAMP (large, higly trafficed websites)? http://www.sourceforge.net comes to mind, but I don't know really what's going on in the background. Specific examples would be helpful to my case. Any ideas? Justin At 12:46 PM 5/31/2002 -0500, you wrote: On Fri, 31 May 2002, Justin Felker wrote: I have spent the last hour pouring over this list's archive. (Not a flame, but I keep seeing this recently. The word is poring.) hehe, thanks. 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? . . . 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? It's really difficult to answer this question without knowing a lot more about your application. But as a casual guess, if you reach that sort of traffic level, I'd say your stumbling block is going to by MySQL. At some point - granted, that point can be far away if you design your database and queries well - it will buckle under load. I'm too busy actually working, unfortunately, to pay attention to the bleeding edge developments in MySQL. But as it stands, there's no serious support for clustering, which means that when you are pushing more transactions than can be handled by the most expensive single machine you can afford, you've hit a brick wall. And as you know, there is a point after which multiple lesser-powered machines are a whole lot cheaper than a single mighty one. If your database transactions are mostly read-only, and you can segregate the infrequent write transactions to a separate server, you can do jury-rigged replication of the main data store and scale indefinitely. Otherwise, you'll probably have to plan with an eye to a migration path toward Oracle, DB2, or whatever. This doesn't mean you can't start out with MySQL, but it does mean you should develop with a database abstraction layer and shouldn't depend on features that are fast in MySQL but poorly supported by other databases (or emulated in the abstraction layer). As for Linux, Apache, and PHP, there's no limit to the transaction volume you can handle with even rudimentary load-balancing tactics, so that's nothing to worry about. miguel -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[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
Re: [PHP] PHP Decisions and Issues
On Fri, 31 May 2002, Justin Felker wrote: I have spent the last hour pouring over this list's archive. (Not a flame, but I keep seeing this recently. The word is poring.) 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? . . . 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? It's really difficult to answer this question without knowing a lot more about your application. But as a casual guess, if you reach that sort of traffic level, I'd say your stumbling block is going to by MySQL. At some point - granted, that point can be far away if you design your database and queries well - it will buckle under load. I'm too busy actually working, unfortunately, to pay attention to the bleeding edge developments in MySQL. But as it stands, there's no serious support for clustering, which means that when you are pushing more transactions than can be handled by the most expensive single machine you can afford, you've hit a brick wall. And as you know, there is a point after which multiple lesser-powered machines are a whole lot cheaper than a single mighty one. If your database transactions are mostly read-only, and you can segregate the infrequent write transactions to a separate server, you can do jury-rigged replication of the main data store and scale indefinitely. Otherwise, you'll probably have to plan with an eye to a migration path toward Oracle, DB2, or whatever. This doesn't mean you can't start out with MySQL, but it does mean you should develop with a database abstraction layer and shouldn't depend on features that are fast in MySQL but poorly supported by other databases (or emulated in the abstraction layer). As for Linux, Apache, and PHP, there's no limit to the transaction volume you can handle with even rudimentary load-balancing tactics, so that's nothing to worry about. miguel -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] PHP Decisions and Issues
Given enough hardware and an appropriately designed application, yes you will be able to scale up as high as you want to go. The big questions are how much money can you spend vs. what performance, stability and fault tolerance do you want out? You have lots of options - Three or four large smp web servers and a one or two replicated mysql servers in a round robin configuration or dozens of moderately powerful servers running both web server and mysql server with a smart load balancing switch in front. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Partly it depends on how you write the application, how many sql calls per page you make, how many are writes vs. reads. It may also make sense to write it into a multi tiered app, having the web server make calls to a dedicated php app server that in turn talks to the database server. I have ways I like to do things, but it really comes down to what you can afford dollar wise, complexity wise, uptime wise and management wise. Jerry On Fri, 31 May 2002, Justin Felker wrote: 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 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
