Saving Money by Switching from PHP to D | Hacker News Reader

Saving Money by Switching from PHP to D

dlang.org

22 pointspjmlp15 comments

"Obviously, performance was a big win. The website felt like it was running on local machines, bringing a dramatic increase to speed and lower latency across the board. After the switch, at first the load on our cloud servers was so low that we thought the website was down! Switching from PHP to D meant we could cut in half the instance size of each Amazon AWS machine in our cloud. And these machines are still underloaded. Our database cloud was highly affected by this too. We now use one quarter of its original computational power. All of this brought an instantaneous and dramatic cost savings, down to more than half of what our costs used to be."

I'm willing to bet they didn't even try a single one of the many possibly optimizations they could have used and actually stay either in PHP or a subset of PHP. It's so much easier to win your argument with a strawman, not to say there aren't cases where D is, in fact, better.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1408417/can-you-compile-...

https://www.keycdn.com/blog/php-performance

Author here. You're wrong. We did a lot of optimizations over the years :) We switched to D just because that's not enaugh

I'm wrong? Then what optimizations did you do? Please, enlighten me. I have a list of methods in the links above, if you don't recall offhand.

Do you think most of the improvements came from the language switch, or was the PHP code so bad that a rewrite allowed for cleaner and fresher architecture?

Companies, businesses, and people in general tend to use the right tool for the right job.

In author's case, it was rather simple I would say: they have acquired an extensive experience in D language and saw its potential by switching from PHP for good.

Could they have used swoole and go fully concurrent and asynchronous with PHP, while maintaining their legacy system? Yes.

Could it perform? With swoole, they could outperform Golang under specific use-cases and circumstances.

But that's not author's point.

Their point is, they have used a language and have saved a lot of money for their business.

Could they have done the same with PHP? I cannot say, I do not know; what I do know though is that a static typed programming language is ideal for writing performant code, especially for businesses that deal with ads, marketing, FinTech, Banking, and Medical systems to say the least.

Author here. The language switch did the trick! Php code was rewritten some years ago. And we also ported some backend code to c++ to improve performance. Code was not that bad. Php is :)

It's so bad that you can build multi billion dollar businesses with it

I certainly don't want to get into the "PHP is a fractal of bad design" vs "PHP is awesome because it runs on a very high percentage of websites, including Facebook" debate. (I have no dog in this race, and I have absolutely no opinion on PHP) But I would ask, are those multi-billion dollar businesses making that much money DUE to their usage of PHP? Or could they run on almost any language/framework and still do just as well? We've heard the stories like "Twitter dropped Rails and rewrote their message queue in Scala, and a lot of their backend in Java"... so I get that there are _some_ scaling stories regarding languages... I just don't think most success stories can be attributed to language choice. Now obviously if you build your entire business on something obscure, and cannot find any competent developers, that's an issue....

That's why I said you "can". As someone who's done c, c++, JavaScript, lisp, prolog, a bit of python, whenever I see people saying such and such language is bad (like trikko's comment), it just strikes me as immature. There are way bigger factors that determine the success or failure of a project yet somehow I keep hearing developers fixated with the idea that the language alone will make or break the project.

Also with drug, weapons, etc. you can build multi billion dollar business, so? Should we give up with good programming practices and join Mafia?

PHP and good programming practices are orthogonal. Nice try at hyperbole, though.

Would I be right to assume that your PHP was version 5.x and you didn't do the upgrade to a 7.x release? PHP made enormous leaps and bounds in terms of performance starting with 7.0, and has subsequently been improved in each of 7.1/7.2/7.3. It even has JIT coming in the next version. One fact: PHP 7.0 started to closely match–and in some cases beat–the performance of HHVM (Facebook's PHP replacement); so even Facebook could likely run on the latest PHP rather than their custom solution.

Personally, if I switched away from PHP for web development these days I would do the backend in Go. But thank you for teaching me something new today. SCGI is not a protocol I'd heard of before, what with FastCGI being the (horribly legacy) standard. I have something new to research. :)

No, we did the upgrade to php7.0 and then 7.2 when 5.2 lifecycle reach its end. It doesn't take so much work, and we see an improvement as well.

I love scgi because it's clean and easy to implement. And it works fine for our use cases.

I have seen similar improvements in my own code migrated from PHP to C++. Yeah, no one writes C++ in this century, etc...

We did a partial migration to c++ in a previous iteration!

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