PHP or ASP, MS SQL or MySQL, Unix or Win2k?

[SysOpt]

Calling all DB/progamming/server gurus! Lets say you need to set up a backend for a site with these specs:

24 Mil server hits / month
4 Mil page views / month (50% of which come from dynamic DB accesses, not static html)
500,000 unique users
100GB data transfer a month

If you were to recommend either ASP or PHP to code database driven applications, which would you choose and why?

If you were to choose MS SQL or MySQL as the DB, which and why?

Unix or Win2k/NT and Apache or IIS?

Also, what kind of server specs would you go with for a dedicated setup for a site with those numbers? And no, we're not talking about SysOpt here http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif - this is for a friend.

Thanks,
Scott


[This message has been edited by SysOpt (edited 01-26-2001).]

[socalgal]

^

[SysOpt]

Ugh, no DB/coding wizards here?

[DemonKnight]

I'm no expert on this so dont take my word to be true unless its beeing backed up by others but here is what I would do.

Multiprocessor servers probably either Athlon or Pentium based, or maybe even solaris systems, running a form of Unix, biggest fastest HDs you can get, as much ram as the thing can handle OC-256 connection http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif With PHP4.

[Nighthawk]

wow. That's a lot of visits.

With a simplistic template page and PHP4 on mandrake 7, ppro 150, and 64MB of RAM, the page processing speed was, if I remember correctly, less than a hundredth of a second. With a buff machine, this could be much faster and could hold more info.

UNIX/PHP4: As shown above, this can be very quick. If you got a cluster of 2 or 3 large multiproc machines with lots of RAM and storage, you'd probably be well off.

IIS: I have worked with a two-machine cluster running IIS 5 on Win2k Adv. Server two dell 400s with 256mb of RAM on ASP applications and they seemed to do fine. I think MS uses a bunch of clusters of W2K AS machines (most likely each has multiple CPUs and gigs of ram).

Bottom line: I have some experience, but I don't know how things really scale in the real world. Linux, PHP4, and MySql have impressed me.

[psyklone]

i've been very impressed with oracle db's running on linux. if you want good performance and stability go with a multi-processor 'nix box ... don't even bother with a windows machine. unix systems may be a little bit more difficult to set up, but performance-wise they're hard to beat and as far as stability is concerned they're unbeatable. my philosphy on unix servers is once you've got a server up and going (or a cluster) you dig a hole, place the server in the hole, and fill it with concrete. you'll not need to worry about constant maintenance and you won't need to worry about anyone jacking with the configs. i've had some windows servers running ms sql show some pretty hefty performance, but i personally don't put faith in them for a high availability solution ... especially with as many queries as you're expecting. that's going to be a pretty active database to say the least.

[runnamukk]

I wouldn't run this on any less than a Sun 10000 running the latest patchset, hosting an Oracle database. Set up a second slightly lesser Sun for hosting WebApp Server for client (browser) service.
Given the number of hits and users, you're probably looking at very well ($$$) configured systems. That is, more than the quad CPU variety. More like fully stocked, with a couple Gig of RAM.

I wouldn't use MS SQL for anything bigger than a POS at an independent autoparts shop.

Ayup, seen and used both.

[ThePhix]

Use Linux and PHP and MySQL. Reason: they don't involve WinNT.

[Rafael]

I'm not a WebMaster guru, but I've been working for more than 10 months in the field and this is what I've found:

PHP/MySQL/Apache/Linux rocks. It could be more difficult to admin if you're unfamiliar with linux (my case), but once you get used to it, it should be no problem.

At this point, I'm in charge of 5 different servers, 4 of them running Linux/PHP/Apache/MySQL and the other one is running ASP/NT/IIS and the last one is really a pain in the @#$.

One of our server hosts an online gaming-site for latin-america and it gets about 30000 hits a day, it runs many online java games with servlets as servers, plus Half-Life/TFC/CounterStrike/UT/Q3A servers over a Dual P-III @700Mhz with 512MbRAM and had not choke for now (it has 9 months running).

I guess that Unix/Linux also have better resource administration than WinNt/2k, (it doesn't have to load any GUI). Its extremly dynamic and its almost bullet proof (this means that the plataform is solid).

MySQL is a great database engine, it may lack of some features, but they can be easily implemented using code in you scripts. Look it this way, the NASA is switching from Oracle to MySQL (read at www.mysql.com) (http://www.mysql.com))

PHP is extremly fast, reliable and easy to use. It's simple but extremly powerfull, I've devloped many, many sites using it and I can say I know about the 20% of everythin tha can be done with it. There is also a lot of documentation on the web. It's also very flexible when you are writing scripts(almost everything can be assigned to everything and it'll work great. Note: I'm not giving support to bad coding). The Zend Optimizer will boost your scripts a lot and the PHP.Net guys are always improving the software everyday, check the versions update to see what I mean.

Php is also so easy to upgrade that you just have to install the library and the re-compile it so PHP can take advantage of it and restart Apache. The upgrade process wont shut-down your server until you restart Apache... this means that the web server will be down less than a second. I added support to hashing, encrypting,XML and WML using this way many times and my servers works flawlessly

And Apache is Apache. It's the all-mighty god of web servers. Almost anything is done for Apache. The version 1.3.14 is superb.

For my experince with the NT server: the most common problem is that something that usually worked stop working for nothing at all, sometimes a file upload will solve the problem, but sometimes it requires to re-write the script to do the same thing using an alternative way.

Well, I better stop writing 'cause I don't want to make this thread any longer. If you have any other question, fell free to write to me at rbastidas@mindhood.com

Hope this helps you out.

Rafael

[TechJumper]

The very Best of luck, Scott

[This message has been edited by TechJumper (edited 02-02-2001).]

[DVNT1]

Here's a response from a member of the http://www.Experts-Exchange.com
-------------------------------------------
From my experience I would go with ASP. The PHP I have been exposed to works fine but doesnt give the
same performance as ASP. ASP is fast and efficient, especially server-side.

Now, I am partial to MS-SQL. I have had the opportunity to develop with many different databases, mySQL,
MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, even FoxPro & Access. Go with MS-SQL. It is super fast and very reliable. Versions
7.0+ are great and very easy to set up, maintain, and back up. And it integrates with ASP very well!
Most Enterprise database apps are moving toward MSSQL now, especially web-based apps.

As far as a server goes, you should consider running the DB on a separate machine. The DB machine should
have multi-processors and as much RAM as possible. And the web machine should also have multi-processors.

The reason for multi-processors is, you will be getting many concurrent hits to each the DB and webserver.
The DB can handle more requests & responses with multi-procs. And if you write your ASP with COM objects,
the multi-procs can take advantage of multi-threading.
Otherwise, users will have to wait for a dynamically loaded page to finish for one request before it
can get to theirs.

Hope this helps!
~ Piz
-------------------------------------------

[kakkarot]

I have a Dual Celeron 433 with 256Mb RAM and twin 40Gb ATA 100 In A RAID configuration running MySQL and PHP4 on WIN2K Advanced Server and IIS 5 and it seems to do the job just fine. I run a business and hold all my Database Information on that machine and it runs the entire LAN/WAN wonderfully along it's 2Mb DSL connection.