
As an internet startup, at what point does PHP start to bottleneck you? - bachanirashmi
As an internet startup, at what point does your MVP build on PHP&#x2F;MySql start to bottleneck you - and you absolutely need to add more layers to the technology stack in the backend?
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onion2k
It depends on what you're doing obviously, but for the majority of businesses
the answer is "Never". A well written PHP/MySQL app will cope with tens of
thousands of users easily. There are good reasons to use other languages
(security, ease of use, strong typing, maturity, lower developer costs, etc)
but choosing PHP certainly isn't going to make your startup any more or less
likely to work.

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bachanirashmi
Thank you! Clarifies what I was looking for.

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bearjaws
At one of my previous jobs we scaled a large travel website you have heard of
on PHP pretty successfully. The only thing that hurt us badly was using
Symfony, it was a HUGE memory hog and exposed really bad issues with PHP APC.
We basically need 1gb of ram per CPU core, an insane figure compared to modern
PHP.

This basically caused us to not use the framework in specific areas to
maximize performance, and use a network layer cache to prevent booting up the
framework entirely.

As with most web tech, the main issues revolved around our database scale, we
had to switch to multi-master around 2012 and it was a huge pain in the ass,
also database migrations causing multi hour replica lag...

Honestly with modern cloud infra, auto scaling groups or serverless, I would
have no concerns scaling PHP.

The way I always put it to anyone asking this kind of question: Build an app
that scales that large and then hire someone else to deal with it :)

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bachanirashmi
Thank you for the detailed response. I've been working in PHP for the years
from 2012 - 2018, and after a break of 2 years from programming just starting
to get back in the game.

Man there's a lot of hate speech against PHP out there - I've been doing my
research to find out what happens after the first MVP is built and
successfully operational in PHP, and your answer pretty much nailed it.

