[geenat]

The choice of PHP had very little to do with it. Digg was 3 webservers with 8 database slaves in 2006.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...

Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...