OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[Paul Rubin]

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 don't know if there is any number to support this perposition. Note
> that  many largest site have open source components in them. Google,
> Amazon,  Yahoo all run on unix variants. Ebay is the notable
> exception, which uses  IIS. Can you really say ebay is performing
> better that amazon (or vice  versa)?

I don't know how much the OS matters.  I don't know how much the web
server matters.  My suspicion is that the big resource sink is the SQL
server.  But I'm wondering what people more experienced than I am say
about this.  Google certainly doesn't use SQL for its web search index.

> I think the chief factor that a site performing poorly is in the
> implementation. It is really easy to throw big money into expensive
> software and hardware and come out with a performance dog. Google's
> infrastructure relies on a large distributed network of commodity
> hardware, not a few expensive boxes. LAMP based infrastructure, if
> used  right, can support the most demanding applications.

Google sure doesn't use LAMP!  I've heard that when you enter a Google
query, about sixty different computers work on it.  The search index
is distributed all over the place and they use a supercomputer-like
interconnect strategy (but based on commodity ethernet switches) to
move stuff around between the processors.