On Sat, 21 Nov 2015 13:28:19 +0000, Joakim wrote: > Actually, it is. What percentage of the PHP code out there needs to > scale much?
Wordpress and MediaWiki are both written in PHP. But this level of scaling doesn't require a framework that scales. It requires a database system that scales, a clever load balancer, and an RPC mechanism. There are several popular forum systems written in PHP, and they are sometimes required to scale a fair bit on a single host. I'm seeing few concrete references in terms of QPS, but it looks like, for phpBB, people are recommending splitting frontend servers from database servers around 1500 simultaneous users. Another way to estimate (crudely) how well platforms scale is to compare pricing for similar products implemented in each. vBulletin, for instance, has a $75/month tier supporting up to 200GB of data transfer. nodeBB has a $100/month tier supporting 500,000 monthly pageviews. These turn out to be roughly comparable if you ignore caching, and nodeBB has some extra value adds. So vBulletin and nodeBB probably scale similarly -- unless one of these organizations is getting significantly different profit margins or something, anyway. And this is evidence toward PHP scaling about as well as Node.js. Collating a large number of examples like this would give us a good overall estimate of each platform's scaling properties.
