Given by Ilia Alshanetsky at Zend Conference on November 1^st, 2006 (Slides)

Some quotes:

• May 2002: yScript -> PHP
• Why we picked PHP
  1. Designed for web scripting
  2. High performance
  3. Large, Open Source community
     • Documentation, easy to hire developers
  4. “Code-in-HTML” paradigm
  5. Integration, libraries, extensibility
  6. Tools: IDE, debugger, profiler
• ./configure –disable-all
• Security: open_basedir, allow_url_fopen = Off, display_errors = Off, safe_mode = Off; input_filter hook
• Performance: Opcode Caches, PHP Extensions in C++
• Globalization: PHP Unicode (2006)

Historical trail of talks about PHP at Yahoo! (worth reading too):

• One Year of PHP at Yahoo! on October 23, 2003 at PHPCon 2003 and July 9, 2003 at OSCON 2002 (HTML, PDF)
• Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! on October 25, 2002 at PHPCon 2002 (HTML, PDF)

Looks like flickr is BIG application and they managed to use PHP and MySQL to develop it.

Interesting quotes:

• Big system:
  • One programmer, one designer, etc.
  • ~60,000 lines of PHP code
  • ~60,000 lines of templates
  • ~70 custom smarty functions/modifiers
  • ~25,000 DB transactions/second at
  • ~1000 pages per second at peak
• Snapshot of db1.flickr.com
  • SELECT’s 44,220,588
  • INSERT’s 1,349,234
  • UPDATE’s 1,755,503
  • DELETE’s 318,439
  • 13 SELECT’s per I/U/D
• Stateless
  • We can bounce people around servers
  • Everything is stored in the database
  • Even the smarty cache\
  • “Shared nothing”
  • (so long as we avoid PHP sessions)
• JOIN’s are slow
• Normaliseddata is for sissies
• Keep multiple copies of data around
• Makes searching faster
• Have to ensure consistency in the application logic
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