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Comment by paulcarroty | Hacker News Reader

PHP, slooow as shit. I don't know how many RAM it needs to work properly.

It's taking up just under 200Mb on my server, with most of that allocated to the MySQL daemon. I have noticed page loading can be pretty slow. No idea why since the CPU monitor never goes above 10%.

It would be interesting to learn the technical reasons for choosing PHP to implement a Dropbox clone.

I'd guess easy hostability would be the main one, not anything technical. More hosting companies support PHP than any other language, and using it means people can set up their own file sharing system without needing to know much about server management.

That's arguably the reason most popular CMS systems run PHP too; because they'd rather have something that's easier to setup and can be run nearly anywhere than something that requires knowing how to use a terminal or something.

I'd suppose it likely was an initial preference of a developer who wrote a quick prototype.

I think shared hosting with php is mostly dead / makes no sense in a world of $5 VPS hosting.

Anyone caring for simplicity of installation would ship a Docker container anyway (for last 5 years or so).

I don't think shared hosting is dead. It's less popular among startups and tech savvy companies than it used too be, but there are still tons of companies and individuals who use it. Companies like GoDaddy and EIG still make a ton of money (even if many would rather they didn't), and many agencies specialising in WordPress/Magento/Drupal/whatever still get a lot of business.

I would be OK with both those, but not distributing packages for CentOS and mingling configuration with program data (You can't just untar the release into your installation location, that will overwrite your local configuration) are the dealbreakers.

It's a nightmare to maintain keep updated (manual processes galore), but it has a fast release cadence. The worst of both worlds.

I'm spoiled by Gitlab...

I'm more than happy with 2vcpu and 2gb ram, php7 is fast.

Slow? PHP 7? Or are you just saying this particular software?

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