[st3fan]

"It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration."

Yeah, Poorly written code in language X can do that.

If developers with poor judgement or knowledge build badly performing Java apps, is that a language problem? I don't think so.

Sounds like they though they got some magical clustering with whatever they used. Instead they should have coded their Java implementation with the same principles that makes PHP rock: don't share state, memcache, scale horizontally. You can then probably replace those those 5 PHP boxes with a single Java server :-)