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Troutgirl, a friendster employee, details the popular sites migration from JSP (Tomcat) to PHP. Of course this resparked the perpetual holy war surrounding which back end technologies best "scale" to handle very large traffic loads. An exactly similar outbreak of expert opinion happened when Yahoo switched to PHP some time ago. Despite the success of the friendster migration (and the use at Yahoo) conventional wisdom among geeks who have the time to engage in such debates in weblogs has usually been that PHP is something of a toy (it's not compiled!) But perhaps finally the other side is getting their message through. This post sums up the case for the underdog.

But the most interesting part of the discussion, I thought, was someone introducing the site go-gaia.com as an example of PHP's (and MySQL's) ability to scale. Huh? I'd never heard of it either. It is an "online anime and roleplaying community." It's built on top of bulletin board software (PHPbb) but incorporates aspects of game play (including collecting and trading items of value.) Check the numbers:

The site was launched February 18, 2003. 17 months later and they now have over 60,000,000 posts, and are adding over 700,000 new posts a day!

One single thread has 640,000 replies.

On Monday June 28th at 3:00pm they had 12,598 of their 774,027 users on line at the same time.

Here's the hardware:

Hardware config
1 x Celeron 1.3 w/512k RAM, single HD
4 x P4 2.6Ghz w/2GB RAM, single HD
1 x Dual Xeon 2.6 w/4GG RAM, 4 80GB HD running as 2 sets of RAID 0 arrays
1 x Dual Opteron 240 w/4GG RAM, 4 x 15,000RPM 16GB HD as 2 sets of RAID 0 arrays from Raid Array controller, 1 80GB HD for OS

The site is free (billed as an alpha release! They have 60,000,000 posts and they're not even in beta yet!) and very graphics heavy. I shudder to think of their bandwidth bill.

Those are some serious numbers. Clearly PHP can do it, or really, MySQL on a dual Opteron with 4 Gigs of Ram and a 4 x 15,0000RPM RAID can do it.

Here's an interview with the man in charge, and here's a technical thread where he shares some of the PHPbb optimizations he has made. Just a little geek traffic porn to start your day.
- jim 7-06-2004 6:23 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

Advanced googling tricks.
- jim 7-05-2004 8:53 pm [link] [add a comment]

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