Rasmus Lerdorf on scaling web apps with PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus’s talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row. Rich web applications make better use of browser user interfaces through the use of less visible round-trips to the server (through AJAX or other methods). These new…

Flickr architecture

Cal Henderson of Ludicorp gave a presentation to the Vancouver PHP Association on September 9 about Flickr’s general architecture and the use of PHP. A zip of the PowerPoint presentation is available on Flickr’s site. I converted the PowerPoint presentation to a PDF file for easy viewing. (via MovableBlog Asides) Some interesting statistics on Flickr as of September 2004: About 60,000 lines of PHP code. About 60,000 lines of templates. About 25,000 database transactions per second at peak. 13 selects per insert/update/delete. About 1,000 pages per second at peak. They use Java for their node service and as a FTP…