Re:Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)
by Mikushi on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @03:35PM
(#23979762)
We experimented with HHVM, had a preview version of it very early on but ultimately the extension support was too bad and the performance gain just not impressive enough to justify moving away from the existing stack.
We didn't have a research-oriented team per say, but myself and a colleague (I was Lead Dev and he Senior) did spend a lot of time experimenting with things like Redis (back when it was very early and "unproven"), varnish, PHP engine tweaks, custom extensions, ... We still did feature work and regular stuff too.
It totally makes sense to use PHP and MySQL as it's what already works, and because there's a team who knows how to use those correctly in this kind of environment.
I just wonder if they have a research-oriented team that could experiment with whatever they see as a potential fit and see if they can improve performance, developer experience (without sacrificing performance) or both. Or if they don't (and if so - why?)
Facebook is kind of famous for this, as they came up with HipHop VM and Hack.