(We haven't actually switched yet, and there isn't significant progress on doing so, but the attitude change was decent) We use PHP for most of our web stack a

(We haven't actually switched yet, and there isn't significant progress on doing so, but the attitude change was decent) We use PHP for most of our web stack at work. This includes long-running consumers that are part of our growing service-oriented architecture. PHP all over. It's hard to say "no" when everyone is familiar with it. We've dealt with pretty crappy performance, compared to other solutions, using this setup. It puts a lot of backpressure on our publishers (we use RabbitMQ as our messaging layer) and it causes queue build-up, which requires manual intervention, etc etc. I had mentioned how we should switch to a better language: didn't go that well. We have a lot of code written already: nothing insurmountable to rewrite, definitely <10k lines of good code, excluding boilerplate-y stuff. It's nearly impossible to get people to drop other priorities to try something new. It has to be a more sure shot. One of our developers, though, wrote a test application in Java to show how much faster we could be consuming and processing messages. He actually replicated one of our simpler services, which isn't much more than turning the messages into rows in a MySQL database. I believe the Java consumer had a ten-fold performance increase over the PHP one. So, now, we have a few internal working groups for various tracks of improvement to our product, and one of those groups is exploring Java as a possible language to switch to for this area of our infrastructure. We have people dedicated to actually vetting it, not just talking about it at the bar or something. Long story short, and to echo everyone else: you can't just tell people there's something better, you have to show them something better.