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> PHP has had a "shared nothing" architecture since the very beginning, that includes DB connections. It helps it to scale (think micro-services being stateless

> PHP has had a "shared nothing" architecture since the very beginning, that includes DB connections. It helps it to scale (think micro-services being stateless in a modern context): nothing is shared between requests, again including connections, by design. A bit ironic that you compare it to microservices, because that exact property of PHP makes it massively unsuitable for microservices and scaling, because it requires another layer in between the microservice platform handling the scaling, and the actual application. PHP has it's uses, but I wouldn't go beyond a classic monolith or "backend/frontend" style application with it, with very little, manual scaling. If you go beyond that, you could probably manage to do that with a proper architecture and doing wonky stuff, but would it be a good fit? Absolutely not.

alphadevx 6y ago
I've been hearing that "PHP does not scale" arguement for many, many, years, in many, many, variations. When you really have to scale, infrastructure, resources, and networks will rapidly overtake any concerns around your choice of language. You can develop crappy architectures in any language, and the inverse is true.
- koffiezet 6y ago
  Not my experience. At scale, once you go down the 'cloud native' (kubernetes) path, the infrastructure part becomes relatively straight-forward, but PHP's weaknesses become very apparent. Doesn't work very well with message queues. Sure, pushing messages is not a problem, but consuming? Something has to do it? But it won't be written in PHP. It doesn't work very well with SQL databases, and with that I mean not the querying etc, but connection pooling, so the database server doesn't suddenly gets flooded by thousands of connections because a service is autoscaled due to heavier load (and sadly, that's a real-world example that brought down a database cluster). Tracing is doable, but not ideal, metrics are hacky due to the need of weird extensions to support shared memory, or rely on an external database such as Redis, which kinda defeats the point of metrics being lightweight. And tuning the PHP runtime almost rivals the JRE...

alphadevx 6y ago

I've been hearing that "PHP does not scale" arguement for many, many, years, in many, many, variations. When you really have to scale, infrastructure, resources, and networks will rapidly overtake any concerns around your choice of language. You can develop crappy architectures in any language, and the inverse is true.

koffiezet 6y ago
Not my experience. At scale, once you go down the 'cloud native' (kubernetes) path, the infrastructure part becomes relatively straight-forward, but PHP's weaknesses become very apparent. Doesn't work very well with message queues. Sure, pushing messages is not a problem, but consuming? Something has to do it? But it won't be written in PHP. It doesn't work very well with SQL databases, and with that I mean not the querying etc, but connection pooling, so the database server doesn't suddenly gets flooded by thousands of connections because a service is autoscaled due to heavier load (and sadly, that's a real-world example that brought down a database cluster). Tracing is doable, but not ideal, metrics are hacky due to the need of weird extensions to support shared memory, or rely on an external database such as Redis, which kinda defeats the point of metrics being lightweight. And tuning the PHP runtime almost rivals the JRE...