Dealing with marketing types...

[Paul Rubin]

Andrew Dalke <dalke at dalkescientific.com> writes:
> 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).

If you're running a web site with 100k users (about 1/3 of the size of
Slashdot) that begins to be the range where I'd say LAMP starts
running out of gas.  Yes, Slashdot is a LAMP site, but it's split
across a rack full of servers and is spending kilobucks a month on
colo space and hosting fees.  Other similarly sized sites face similar
expenses.  It seems to me that by using implementation methods that
map more directly onto the hardware, a site with Slashdot's traffic
levels could run on a single modest PC (maybe a laptop).  I believe
LiveJournal (which has something more like a million users) uses
methods like that, as does ezboard.  There was a thread about it here
a year or so ago.

As a simple example, that article's advice of putting all fine grained
session state into the database (so that every single browser hit sets
off SQL queries) is crazy.  One site I worked on got a huge speedup by
simply storing the most frequently used stuff from the user session in
a browser cookie.  That required zero extra work to handle multiple
servers (whichever server got the query, got the cookie) and it saved
a ton of SQL traffic.

As for "big", hmm, I'd say as production web sites go, 100k users is
medium sized, Slashdot is "largish", Ebay is "big", Google is huge.