Andrew Dalke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > My question to you is - what is "something big"? I've not been > on any project for which "LAMP" can't be used, and nor do I > expect to be. After all, there's only about 100,000 people in > the world who might possibly interested using my software. (Well, > the software I get paid to do; not, say, the couple of patches I've > sent in to Python).
If you're running a web site with 100k users (about 1/3 of the size of Slashdot) that begins to be the range where I'd say LAMP starts running out of gas. Yes, Slashdot is a LAMP site, but it's split across a rack full of servers and is spending kilobucks a month on colo space and hosting fees. Other similarly sized sites face similar expenses. It seems to me that by using implementation methods that map more directly onto the hardware, a site with Slashdot's traffic levels could run on a single modest PC (maybe a laptop). I believe LiveJournal (which has something more like a million users) uses methods like that, as does ezboard. There was a thread about it here a year or so ago. As a simple example, that article's advice of putting all fine grained session state into the database (so that every single browser hit sets off SQL queries) is crazy. One site I worked on got a huge speedup by simply storing the most frequently used stuff from the user session in a browser cookie. That required zero extra work to handle multiple servers (whichever server got the query, got the cookie) and it saved a ton of SQL traffic. As for "big", hmm, I'd say as production web sites go, 100k users is medium sized, Slashdot is "largish", Ebay is "big", Google is huge. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
