Forum Moderators: coopster
I'm a confused webmaster at the moment. Our site has been online since 1999. Since we have always been on a Mac, we had a Filemaker database and used a data engine called Lasso. As the site has grown, we moved our databases to MySQL and continued to use Lasso. When it's working, Lasso is very fast and some people swear by it. When it delivers connection failures and internal server errors, it is painful, especially since tech support at my host doesn't support it like they used to and there are fewer developers who know the language.
I decided to move to PHP, but I had a Lasso developer send me a note with this info:
<quote>
I can safely say that Lasso is the better language hands down, from a security standpoint, from an ease of use standpoint, and from a speed stand point. ALL 3 vital issues. I have a feeling you'll find that your troubles with PHP are just beginning and of a different nature all together. You think you've got problems NOW...with a few pages not responding. You have to remember that PHP is dependent on the WebServer that's driving it...Lasso is not. Lasso is an independent application server. PHP is not. So if the Apache WebServer goes pooof, so does PHP. No one seems to remember that lil issue when considering PHP. If you're on your own server then that's fine, but not if you're in with a bunch of other sites.
</quote>
Since I've never worked with PHP, I don't know what I'm in for. I would hate to have my code rewritten in PHP only to realize how good I had it with Lasso. I know this is kind of a general query, but any thoughts on the issue are appreciated.
Some info about our site:
Hosted on a collocated Mac Xserve.
Traffic, about 4 million views/month. Lots of searches.
Lasso is an independent application server. PHP is not. So if the Apache WebServer goes pooof, so does PHP.
I have to admit to having never heard of Lasso, but the above sentence doesn't make much sense. Unless it's spectacularly badly configured, Apache does not usually go "pooof" (all I can think of as a translation of "pooof" are segmentation faults, usually through conflicting Apache modules, which shouldn't be an issue unless you're playing with exotic stuff). The worst that can happen to an Apace configured for a PHP environment is chronical overload (high traffic, or badly written PHP code) and that would of course negatively affect any other applications (middleware, databases) running on the same server. The same would be true whatever application is serving HTTP requests. It's also possible to run PHP as a script (e.g. via cronjobs) independently of Apache.
If you are looking into PHP, you'll probably need to consider one of the code cacheing mechanisms, otherwise serving 4 million pages a month on one server might make performance an issue.
(Personally I don't like PHP at all, but that's a topic for a seperate flame thread ;-).
--Mark
as far as traffic goes there are a lot of limits to talk about.
in a php/mysql site you also have apache, an OS, the pipe to the box, you also may have ssl accelerators, load balancers, firewalls. The box may be shared or dedicated.
a million things to consider
>> consider one of the code cacheing mechanisms
many many things to consider before worrying about that, you need a proper server setup first
