Question on PhP, MySQL

[kimshapiro100]

Question on PhP, MySQL

I am thinking of a consumer internet business for which I will have to
have a database driven site built.

I am thinking of using
PhP, MySQL as the main technologies amd Linux hosting( and some
Dreamweaver).

My question is:
what is the maximum number of hits (UUs) a day/month can such a site
with these technologies handle ?

How robust is PhP, MySQL?

Thanks

Kim

[Bill Karwin]

ki***********@yahoo.com wrote:

My question is:
what is the maximum number of hits (UUs) a day/month can such a site
with these technologies handle ?
A very common question. Let me pose a question back to you, that should
help illustrate why this is hard to answer:

Assume for the moment that your business is one that ships merchandise
to customers. How many trucks will it take to transport your
merchandise to the customer? How long will it take to ship the
merchandise? How much will the shipping cost?

The answers depends, in large part, on what your merchandise is, who
your customers are, where they are located, priority level of the
shipping, special shipping considerations like refrigeration, etc.

Likewise, asking how many hits a day these technologies support depends
on too many other things for it to be an answerable question here. For
instance, what does your application have to do to respond to an average
request? How much calculation and data storage must be done? What type
of content does it send back in response? What is the required response
time? What type of servers and internet connectivity does the system
have? How many servers do you have to split up the load?

These are rhetorical questions -- I'm not asking you to answer them
here. The point is that no one on a newsgroup can answer your true
question: how many hits per hour, day, or month can _your_ system
expect to achieve?

There are also many ways to use a database, more or less expensively.
When developing any software system, keep in mind that even the
speediest database or web server technology still has finite limits. Be
mindful of how much work you're requiring the system to do on each hit.
For instance, can you design the system to prepare frequently-used
data as an offline task, so you don't require every page hit to generate
the same content? Focus on optimizing a few such tasks that tend to be
either the most expensive *or* the most frequent (even a trivial task
that has to be done millions of times can slow your system down).
How robust is PhP, MySQL?

Robust enough that they are rarely the cause of unrobustness, for most
business' purposes. Neither PHP nor MySQL are bug-free, far from it.
You can read them at http://bugs.php.net/ and http://bugs.mysql.com/.
But it's more likely that an individual application that is written
employing PHP and MySQL contains the bugs that cause problems.

You can also read about high-profile users of MySQL here:
http://www.mysql.com/customers/
Some of these companies use PHP. Read the case studies, they may give
you interesting ideas for implementing your own system.

Marc Andreessen, Oracle, and IBM seem to like PHP too:
http://news.com.com/Andreessen+PHP+s...3-5903187.html
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub...haise_age.html
http://news.com.com/Zend+brings+PHP+...3-5893187.html
http://news.com.com/Big+Blue+backs+P...l?tag=nefd.top

Good luck with your business!

Regards,
Bill K.

[Gordon Burditt]

>I am thinking of a consumer internet business for which I will have to

have a database driven site built.

I am thinking of using
PhP, MySQL as the main technologies amd Linux hosting( and some
Dreamweaver).

My question is:
what is the maximum number of hits (UUs) a day/month can such a site
with these technologies handle ?

What is the number of cashiers you need to hire sell 20,000 CDs at
a brick-and-mortar store in a month? It depends a lot on whether
they are going to all visit your store in the same hour, or whether
it will be spread evenly over the month (as many sales at 3AM as
3PM), or whether you'll have peak sales in the evening or on weekends.

How complicated is a hit? Does it show the user's account back 10
years, or just stick the user's name somewhere on the page most of
the time?

Gordon L. Burditt