OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[Steve Holden]

Jack Diederich wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 10:09:49PM -0800, Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
>>aurora <aurora00 at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>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?
> 
> [reordered Paul's email a bit]
> 
> 
>>>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.
>>
>>This is the kind of answer I had in mind.
> 
> 
> *ding*ding*ding*  The biggest mistake I've made most frequently is using
> a database in applications.  YAGNI.  Using a database at all has it's
> own overhead.  Using a database badly is deadly.  Most sites would
> benefit from ripping out the database and doing something simpler.
> Refactoring a database on a live system is a giant pain in the ass,
> simpler file-based approaches make incremental updates easier.
> 
> The Wikipedia example has been thrown around, I haven't looked at the
> code either;  except for search why would they need a database to
> look up an individual WikiWord?  Going to the database requires reading
> an index when pickle.load(open('words/W/WikiWord')) would seem sufficient.
> 
[...]
>>
>>I don't mean LAMP is inherently slow, I just mean that a lot of
>>existing LAMP sites are observably slow.
> 
> 
> A lot of these are just implementation.  Going the dumb non-DB way won't
> prevent you from making bad choices but if a lot of bad choices are made
> simply because of the DB (my assertion) dropping the DB would avoid
> some bad choices.  I think Sourceforge has one table for all project's
> bugs & patches.  That means a never used project's bugs take up space
> in the index and slow down access to the popular projects.  Would a
> naive file-based implementation have been just as bad?  maybe.
> 
> If there is interest I'll follow up with some details on my own LAMP
> software which does live reports on gigs of data and - you guessed it -
> I regret it is database backed.  That story also involves why I started
> using Python (the prototype was in PHP).
> 
Having said all this, I'd happily campaign for a relational backend to 
MoinMoin if it would speed up the execrably slow performance we 
currently see on the python.org wiki. I haven't investigated why 
response times went up so much, but I have a distinct feeling it's to do 
with a new release.

regards
  Steve
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