[nrser]

as the other commenter said, php is a web framework... and it's what we were using. it's actually more of a web framework than a language in my opinion (or at least was at that point). it's centered around receiving http requests and writing http responses. the article mentions this in fact.

it was a huge pain to try and get php to do anything else. it was totally unpractical to do the kinds of back end processing that we needed (since the database was pretty much off limits during a http request)... long running processes with hundreds of millions of objects were a no-go. believe me, we tried. which meant you had to sync all your logic into Java or something else that could handle the job. which is really error prone when you have a bunch of people moving fast on something.

one of the greatest things about php is that it's a super minimal focused framework. it's also one of it's major short-comings when that model no longer suffices.

you can layer something else on top of it, but the stuff available at the time certainly didn't help the performance or memory characteristics.