OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[Dave Brueck]

Steve Holden wrote:
> Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
>> Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> writes:
>>
>>> It's more than a bit unfair to compare Wikipedia with Ebay or
>>> Google.  Even though Wikipedia may be running on high-performance
>>> hardware, it's unlikely that they have anything like the underlying
>>> network structure (replication, connection speed, etc), total number
>>> of cpus or monetary resources to throw at the problem that both Ebay
>>> and Google have.  I suspect money trumps LAMP every time.
>>
>>
>>
>> I certainly agree about the money and hardware resource comparison,
>> which is why I thought the comparison with 1960's mainframes was
>> possibly more interesting.  You could not get anywhere near the
>> performance of today's servers back then, no matter how much money you
>> spent.  Re connectivity, I wonder what kind of network speed is
>> available to sites like Ebay that's not available to Jane Webmaster
>> with a colo rack at some random big ISP.  Also, you and Tim Danieliuk
>> both mentioned caching in the network (e.g. Akamai).  I'd be
>> interested to know exactly how that works and how much difference it
>> makes.
>>
> It works by distributing content across end-nodes distributed throughout 
> the infrastructure. I don't think Akamai make any secret of their 
> architecture, so Google (:-) can help you there.

They definitely didn't make it a secret - they patented it. The gist of their 
approach was to put web caches all over the place and then have their DNS 
servers resolve based on where the request was coming from - when your browser 
asks their DNS server where whatever.akamai.com is, they try to respond with a 
web cache that is topologically close.

> Of course it makes a huge difference, otherwise Google wouldn't have 
> registered their domain name as a CNAME for an Akamai node set.

Yes and no - web caching can be very beneficial. Web caching with Akamai may or 
may not be worth the price; their business was originally centered around the 
idea that quality bandwidth is expensive - while still true to a degree, prices 
have fallen a ton in the last few years and continue to fall.

And who knows what sort of concessions they made to win the Google contract (not 
saying that's bad, just realize that Akamai would probably even take a loss on 
the Google contract because having Google as a customer makes people conclude 
that their service must make a huge difference ;-) ).

-Dave