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So, a pretty massive rewrite and then it's 10% faster? Wonder how much of the reason for it in the first place is that a bunch of PHP/standard component program
by mhd 15y ago
So, a pretty massive rewrite and then it's 10% faster? Wonder how much of the reason for it in the first place is that a bunch of PHP/standard component programmers are probably easier to get (and replace) than competent Perl hackers…
- Sujan 15y ago10% faster is quite an achievement for a site, that was fast before. Additionally, I don't think speed was the primary drover behind the rewrite. I'm still waiting for the video/audio of the presentation, but he mentions the 'very complex architecture' of the PERL backend. So switching to a 'standard' architecture that fits on one PP slide seems liek a very good idea.
- EricPickupYP 15y agoI love Perl (worked with it for 10 years) but we decided early on that finding enough good Perl devs would be too hard. There are still a few Perl parts of the rewrite, you need to use the right tool for the job.
- mhd 15y agoSure, and I certainly agree with that choice. In my (limited) experience, a Perl->PHP rewrite either indicates a desire for more developers or a seriously weird or outdated Perl architecture. The latter was quite common in the early days of the web, where basically everyone's first web page was a mess of Perl CGI (or mod_perl a bit later), but as YP isn't that old and performed well enough before, I wouldn't have thought that this was the case here. Thanks for confirming my suspicion, wasn't intended as criticism.
- mst 15y agoYouPorn-before-the-sale outed themselves as a Catalyst stack user some time back; memory says they offered to donate a machine to act as an irc.perl.org node to help the community out but then discovered that their ISP at the time wouldn't allow IRC ...
- badclient 15y agoFunny. When I was running my music startup with couple mil users, it was originally coded in perl by my perl-genius cofounder. When my cofounder dropped, it was next to impossible to find solid perl developers(there are many who tinker with it). I remember recoding it in php and life getting so much easier.
- mst 15y ago"Finding enough good Perl devs" is actually very doable, it just tends to involve engaging them through the CPAN community. We've helped customers out with it a few times, with good results overall. On the other hand, when trying to de-convolute an architecture a change of primary language often helps. Does "we were substantially more confident of our ability to recruit sufficient PHP talent than Perl" seem like a reasonable rephrasing?
- ma2rten 15y agoI wonder if they considered HipHop instead of php-fpm.
- kijin 15y agoMaybe they were focusing more on scalability than individual page load speeds?