Question

I get more often the answer, when asking performance related stuff regarding PHP applications, that PHP really isn’t the language for high-performance applications, and that a compiled language really is the way to go.
The only thing holding me back to PHP is that it’s what I have learned to work with for some while now and the development is quite rapid.

So, is PHP a thing of the past and should be put aside in web applications in favour of Ruby, for instance?

Update:

Premature optimization is usually what I have gotten as an answer when being too focused on optimizing stuff too early in the process, but I feel that it’s quite far away from choosing the right language which has the best prerequisites.

Thanks

Answer 1

There are tons of good reasons to switch from PHP to Ruby. Performance is not one of them. Some of the largest sites on the web use PHP. It’s perfectly capable of performing well if you use it right.

If working on a high-performance application, there are many things to consider when optimizing for speed:

• Where are your bottlenecks? At the database or application level?
• Are you using caching to speed up requests?
• Can you get a performance boost via load balancing or separating the database server from the web server. Hardware is cheap, programmers are not.
• Consider using a performance optimized language on the back end, but keep using PHP on the front end.