Oh yeah? Why not? We built a self-scaling multi-processing conversion system entirely in php @ http://massify.com/ http://massify.com/. In like 2-3 weeks. H

Oh yeah? Why not? We built a self-scaling multi-processing conversion system entirely in php @ http://massify.com/ http://massify.com/. In like 2-3 weeks. Had it deployed a week after that. It's been running for 2+ years with zero maintenance and handles all of the video, image, audio and office docs -> swf conversions. It's not a trivial system, but for what it does is simple enough to be beautiful despite the language it was built in. It was designed to completely share nothing, message based, isolated, fault tolerant. I could go into the architecture more if you are interested. Now Massify is not youtube scale, but this could scale to that size with minor adjustment (mostly with balancing uploads to the upload handlers). In it's current incarnation, the thing will scale by itself to whatever restraint Amazon puts on it. We had one film contest were we watched the thing spin up a ton of ec2 instances and then tear them down when it was done. It was a little like watching an army of media converting robots. So I was going to write this long winded thing about why I used PHP to do it, but at the end of the day it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that it works and works well. If writing this kind of stuff in PHP doesn't appeal to you, then cool, good for you. But your notion that it can't be done or done well is not grounded in any kind of reality.