OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[aurora]

> aurora <aurora00 at gmail.com> writes:
>> Slow compares to what? For a large commerical site with bigger budget,
>> better infrastructure, better implementation, it is not surprising
>> that  they come out ahead compares to hobbyist sites.
>
> Hmm, as mentioned, I'm not sure what the commercial sites do that's
> different.  I take the view that the free software world is capable of
> anything that the commercial world is capable of, so I'm not awed just
> because a site is commercial.  And sites like Slashdot have pretty big
> budgets by hobbyist standards.
>
>> Putting implementation aside, is LAMP inherently performing worst than
>> commerical alternatives like IIS, ColdFusion, Sun ONE or DB2? Sounds
>> like  that's your perposition.
>
> I wouldn't say that.  I don't think Apache is a bottleneck compared
> with other web servers.  Similarly I don't see an inherent reason for
> Python (or whatever) to be seriously slower than Java servlets.  I
> have heard that MySQL doesn't handle concurrent updates nearly as well
> as DB2 or Oracle, or for that matter PostgreSQL, so I wonder if busier
> LAMP sites might benefit from switching to PostgreSQL (LAMP => LAPP?).

I'm lost. So what do you compares against when you said LAMP is slow? What  
is the reference point? Is it just a general observation that slashdot is  
slower than we like it to be?

If you are talking about slashdot, there are many ideas to make it faster.  
For example they can send all 600 comments to the client and let the user  
do querying using DHTML on the client side. This leave the server serving  
mostly static files and will certainly boost the performance tremendously.

If you mean MySQL or SQL database in general is slow, there are truth in  
it. The best thing about SQL database is concurrent access, transactional  
semantics and versatile querying. Turns out a lot of application can  
really live without that. If you can rearchitect the application using  
flat files instead of database it can often be a big bloom.

A lot of these is just implementation. Find the right tool and the right  
design for the job. I still don't see a case that LAMP based solution is  
inherently slow.