How Stack Overflow upgraded from Windows Server 2012

Re:How Stack Overflow upgraded from Windows Server 2012 by nikanj on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @07:23AM (#20505871)

The performance of PHP was a joke when Stack Overflow started. It has gotten way better since, but back then it was reading, parsing and compiling every single script your page loaded, for every single page load. You could hack around this with an accelerator module like APC or Zend, but why bother learning how to code around PHPs limitations, when you're already fluent in C# that's plenty fast without any hacking.

Not sure how the story goes for Rails, but Python (Django) used to be a pig when SO was started over a decade ago, for similar reasons as PHP.

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Re:How Stack Overflow upgraded from Windows Server 2012 by p_l on Sunday July 28, 2019 @12:18PM (#20548263)

PHP performance is still a pig, which is pasted over by various caching behaviours (for example in OS). I have to deal with making HA for a PHP site whose design precludes keeping read-only copies of PHP code, and have to load them form NFS... let's just say that even with php.ini tweaks it involves pretty much constant reads of code.

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Re:How Stack Overflow upgraded from Windows Server 2012 by viraptor on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @08:16AM (#20506101)

> Python (Django) used to be a pig when SO was started over a decade ago, for similar reasons as PHP.

Django's execution model is not at all similar to how PHP code is being run. Pretty much every python web server uses wsgi (or mod_python before that) which relies on a persistent app server. Whatever are the reasons for django's assumed performance issues, PHP's runtime model had nothing to do with it.

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