[cweagans]

I'm a PHP developer that works for a major media company. We do large scale deployments, and I'd like to say that PHP is a terrible language that gets a bad rap. It's getting better, and it's already 1000000x better than the PHP4 days, but it's still not a nice language. It's not a nice runtime. The only thing nice about it is that a zillion people and their dogs all know it and it's relatively easy to deploy.

[j42]

This. It really depends how you use it.

In some ways they've introduced some powerful features bringing it on par with other languages, but the reality is that performance varies wildly in the real world because opcaches are finicky dependent on the data/request type/frequency and automated GC/circular-reference optimization is far from perfect.

Between HHVM (to effectively make memory growth linear vs logarithmic when approaching higher request concurrency) and sensible opcache tweaks you can make that runtime a bit less stochastic at scale, however if you don't know what you're doing PHP makes it so easy to go in the complete opposite direction without any indications you're running toward a cliff...

[look_lookatme]

Do you use an off the shelf framework or CMS?

[cweagans]

We use Drupal.

[Gigablah]

Well, there you go.

[cweagans]

Are you suggesting that off-the-shelf frameworks/CMSes are somehow inferior to writing everything from scratch? That seems pretty myopic. We gain a lot from using Drupal.

[smt88]

Any experience with HHVM yet?

[cweagans]

We haven't been/won't be using it. Most of our traffic is anonymous, so we can optimize other parts of our stack. We'd rather not have to debug weird shit that comes up because of HHVM incompatibility.