
Rasmus Lerdorf - PHP frameworks? Think again. - ahold
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/29/rasmus-lerdorf-php-frameworks-think-again/
======
mseebach
I did some consulting a few months ago. A FOAF had developed and launched a
quite comprehensive online textbook, and their success was choking the the
website. They don't know much programming, and had they not used a framework
(and one of the slower ones at that), they wouldn't have launched. Period.

I moved in, got them off shared hosting, replaced the built-in search with a
Apache Solr, tuned the cache and a few other quick wins, took my money and
left them my phonenumber. They live to fight another year or two, and I'll
stop by and help again then.

Scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is.

[http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-
up-y....](http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-up-y.html)

Frameworks helps getting people to give a shit, custom C++ extensions doesn't,
so use a framework, unless Yahoo! called.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The majority of Drupal users I know couldn't write a line of C++ to save their
lives. Many of them can't write a line of PHP, either. I'm constantly
impressed with the patience of these people, but they get results.

In a world where every church, school, and small business could afford its own
personal Rasmus Lerdorf, we'd all have much more efficient code that was
lovingly hand-optimized for our specific applications. In the real world,
hardware grows on trees, while Rasmus Lerdorf probably costs something like
$400 per hour.

~~~
thomasmallen
I'm a PHP dev, but I'm always surprised by how seldom I have to code anything
besides a theme in Drupal.

------
streety
I can't find any further details on this claim. It wouldn't surprise me if it
was true but benchmarks really do depend on the details. I want more info.

Skipping over the use of "Hello World!" in benchmarks is anyone actually
surprised by this? Frameworks aren't a silver bullet. I don't think they were
ever meant to be, especially when it comes to performance. There is nothing
stopping you from going in to the framework code and optimising it or even
taking functionality over to C++ if that's what you want.

~~~
christefano
For benchmarks with Drupal, see [http://www.opensourcery.com/blog/jonathan-
hedstrom/drupalcon...](http://www.opensourcery.com/blog/jonathan-
hedstrom/drupalcon-rasmus-lerdorf-php-performance-and-drupal-performance-
correction)

------
altano
So we should all abandon our frameworks entirely for C++ because we're going
to be getting Yahoo levels of traffic, trees are people too, and no one's ever
achieved 280 req/sec with a framework because things like caching don't exist.

And the semantic web is cool.

What the fuck? Why is anyone upvoting this link? It's completely insane.

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aristus
Ah, Rasmus. Rasmus is kind of like the last hockey player who doesn't wear a
helmet and looks down on the rest of us pussies. We don't all have 500 million
users, man.

He's a got a good point: PHP _is_ a framework. It's just not a very easy one.
Clue, Ras: when your users ask you constantly for certain features (say, named
parameters or templating) and you don't give it to them, they will go around
you. Or they'll stop using your language.

~~~
christefano
You had me until you said that PHP is a framework.

------
swombat
What a load of crap. Quite surprising to hear that sort of tripe come from a
respected figure like Rasmus Lerdorf... but then, he did invent PHP.

First of all, requests/s per server is not a measure of performance, it's a
measure of scalability. I can take the same system he's got, buy 9 other
identical servers, and get 10 times the throughput. Does that mean they're
higher performance? No, just higher scalability.

Secondly, scalability is not your problem. Getting people to give a shit about
your site/product is your problem. Scalability is a hard problem later, but it
is only worth really worrying about once it is a real problem.

Rasmus Lerdorf: -1.

~~~
BlueZeniX
He wasn't really talking about scalability but req/sec which has more to do
with speed/latency.

Getting people to care about your website requires it being fast .. see
Google: "Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time
dropped traffic by 20%." ([http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-
it-costs-y...](http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-
sales-how-crush-it))

But then again, if you want speed why use PHP at all ;-)

~~~
swombat
From TFA:

 _He continues on by stating that PHP developers really need to think about
performance for not only scalability reasons but for green reasons._

Sounds to me like he cares about performance because of scalability. That's
retarded.

Upon second reading, I'm beginning to think that the writer failed to follow
what was being said. I can't believe that someone like Rasmus Lerdorf would
say something quite so daft, and the style of the article is erratic to say
the least. So maybe it's just the writer who misinterpreted what RL said.

------
jonhohle
"To get the speed that is necessary for truly massive web systems you have to
use compiled C++ extensions to get true, scaleable architecture."

But at the same time, even creating a simple procedural PHP extension is a
huge undertaking (much more than it needs to be), accentuated by poor and out
of date documentation all around, and large parts of documentation are missing
from the PHP site concerning extension creation.

------
compay
Rasmus is a one trick pony who sees the entire universe of programming through
the prism of application performance.

~~~
davidw
Is Guido a "one trick pony" too? That's pretty disparaging language for
someone who came up with such a widely used programming language.

That language is not something I'm particularly enamored of, but Rasmus is a
bright guy, who created something that thousands (tens, hundreds of
thousands?) of people the world over use. That's not bad for "a one trick
pony".

(BTW, would you call him that to his face?)

~~~
compay
I'm not saying he's not bright and a bad guy, or that PHP sucks.

I've been reading stuff from him since '99 when I first started working with
PHP. I've seen him talk. As far as I can tell, the _only_ thing Rasmus ever
really gets excited about is performance - he's been saying the same thing for
_years._

