Dealing with marketing types...

[Andrew Dalke]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> That article makes a lot of bogus claims and is full of hype.  LAMP is
> a nice way to throw a small site together without much fuss, sort of
> like fancy xerox machines are a nice way to print a small-run
> publication without much fuss.  If you want to do something big, you
> still need an actual printing press.

In the comments the author does say he's trying to be provocative.

My question to you is - what is "something big"?  I've not been
on any project for which "LAMP" can't be used, and nor do I
expect to be.  After all, there's only about 100,000 people in
the world who might possibly interested using my software.  (Well,
the software I get paid to do; not, say, the couple of patches I've
sent in to Python).

I had one client consider moving from Python/CGI/flat files to
Java/WebLogic/Oracle.  The old code took nearly 10 seconds to
display a page (!).  They were convinced that they had gone past
the point where Python/CGI was useful, and they needed to use a
more scalable enterprise solution.  The conviction meant they
didn't profile the system.  With about a day of work I got the
performance down to under a second by removing some needless imports,
delaying others until they were needed, making sure all the
.pyc files existed, etc.

I could have gotten more performance switching to a persistent
Python web server and using a database instead of a bunch of
flat files in a directory, but that wasn't worth the time.

				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com