NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Shiflett]

--- George Schlossnagle <george at omniti.com> wrote:
> Chris' statement had a bunch of fluff to it, but his basic argument (or 
> at least my paraphrase of it) is that stateless applications have 
> infinite horizontal scalability since they persist no data from request 
> to request.

That's it, except you and I seem to have different definitions of fluff.
:-)

(I think fluff means unnecessary or superfluous information, whereas your
statement below makes it seem like you believe fluff to be misleading
information.)

> Of course this ignores the point that you often have to persist data 
> from request to request, which is why I find that general argument to 
> be a bit fluffy.

This is a valid criticism, and it's something I mention in my brief
discussion with Jack Herrington, author of The PHP Scalability Myth that
got a lot of attention last fall. You can read my comments here:

http://www.codegeneration.net/lth_archives/000248.html

You could say I "come clean" with the following:

"Also, regarding my most recent blog entry, it isn't entirely fair to
Java, but my focus is on PHP (and I never state that Java doesn't scale).
With so many people thinking Java scales more naturally than PHP, I find
it somewhat funny that the opposite is closer to the truth. But,
realistically, no PHP application is going to live in isolation, and as
soon as databases, session stores, and the like enter the picture, the two
are back on pretty even ground."

I just don't like seeing arguments about scalability that are pretty much
the opposite of the truth. I've written my share of applications for
platforms with an "application server" (ColdFusion, JSP), and I definitely
enjoy some of the conveniences that this type of environment offers me as
a developer. But, I would never kid myself and argue that this environment
scales better than something like PHP or mod_perl. That's not really a
good argument at all, but it's common.

> It's like saying that my car can do 400 mph, it just needs the right
> engine.

I don't really get that analogy, but I understand your argument anyway.
:-)

Chris

=====
Chris Shiflett - http://shiflett.org/

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