Friendster: switch to PHP

By Harry Fuecks | June 29, 2004 | PHP

Via an anonymous tip off (OK Simon) – Friendster goes PHP, switching from JSP / Tomcat.

Apparently performance has visibly improved to end users.

Eventually Rasmus’s message of PHP as a Shared Nothing Architecture will sink in…

Written By:

Harry Fuecks

Harry has been working in corporate IT since 1994, with everything from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Outside of office hours he runs phpPatterns: a site dedicated to software design with PHP that aims to raise standards of PHP development. He also maintains Dynamically Typed: SitePoint's PHP blog.

Is PHP the natural upgrade path for ASP 3.0 / VB 6?

{ 13 comments }

anon September 27, 2006 at 7:50 am: could it be because of a reconsilidating stand point? Where php developers are cheaper than J2EE / .NET devs?
GeorgeB. November 29, 2004 at 12:03 pm: All in all, if they’re happy, and their site runs faster, it was a good decision.
Q – http://www.halofans.com
pointbeing August 19, 2004 at 4:30 am: Yahoo, Internet.com, now Friendster. I’m not surprised – in my previous work at a web agency, about two thirds of our business came from companies moving to Open Source, away from ASP and Java. About 30% was from one company alone – a major European auto manufacturer who were thoroughly disappointed with their JSP solution.
The only question left is, how long before Amazon migrate? ;)
Perrin Harkins July 3, 2004 at 6:10 pm: Martin Ericksen needs to actually read that ACM article if he’s going to attempt to quote from it. It does NOT say that Java outperforms PHP and Perl by a factor of 8. What it does say is that using any kind of dynamic generation is up to 8 times slower than static pages. This should surprise no one.
marcel July 2, 2004 at 1:33 pm: Clickz.com used to run on Tomcat and JSP at some point. They also turned to PHP a year or so ago. In fact the whole Internet.com network runs most of it’s content on PHP
Marcel
http://computingdiary.com
NativeMind July 1, 2004 at 6:39 pm: I believe it means that $_SESSION is much faster than $_COOKIE
cagrET June 30, 2004 at 12:40 pm: http://talks.php.net/show/lt2004-lamp/7
> No $_COOKIE for you
What does it mean ?
jasonlotito June 30, 2004 at 10:05 am: A testing environment is one thing. Production is another. If a developer moves from X to Y, and things speed up and improve because of it, no amount of tests is going to change the fact that moving from X to Y speed thigns up.
Dangermouse June 30, 2004 at 6:34 am: Well now Friendster have changed, im sure Microsoft will follow suite soon ;)
Martin Hjort Eriksen June 30, 2004 at 6:14 am: This is a funny result. I am my self a PHP enthusiast, but i the journal “ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 31 Issue 3″ there was an article called “A performance comparison of dynamic Web technologies” where Perl, Java server technolgy (also tomcat) and Perl was benchmarked in a labratory environment. It was concluded that Serverside Java outpreformed PHP and Perl by a factor 8.
andre June 30, 2004 at 12:52 am: could it be that their Java implementation was badly-engineered, that’s why its performance was substandard before?
z0s0 June 29, 2004 at 7:52 pm: ahh nothing like seeing a PHP error on php.net ;-)
http://talks.php.net/show/lt2004-lamp/1
tsigo June 29, 2004 at 7:26 pm: Wow, it’s a lot faster. A lot.