[acdha]

I used chroots, too, and it was useful but much harder to maintain than a container. Automation wasn't impossible, of course, but that was also complicated by concerns about bloating each chroot with copies of all of the system libraries & config files.

I used PHP in that era. It could be faster but then you're in the classic developer productivity tradeoff between, say, hand-coded SQL calls versus using an ORM, etc. The PHP frameworks which were comparable productivity-wise to Rails were also a lot closer to Rails performance-wise since they also had heavy abstractions, and they tended to have even more creative ways to create security holes. (I am feeling very old remembering arguing against enabling register_globals circa 1998)

[tluyben2]

Hahah yeah ; I did a lot of hosting then and everyone insisted on register_globals. I still run stuff for clients that depends on it to this day.

And maybe the rails perf was comparable to the larger pho frameworks in some cases, but php was really much easier to scale in our experience. We hosted millions of sites and the python/ruby ones were generally dramas when they got serious (for that time) traffic.

[acdha]

You could still write bad code, of course, but deploying mod_php sure was easy. People could still write bad code (thinking here of someone who processed a database join in a foreach loop rather than learning how to use a WHERE constraint) but I do miss that level of install simplicity, at least until I remember what it was like dealing with incompatible versions or reconciling configuration in multiple places.