Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!

Speaker Info

Outline

Motivation

World’s Biggest Site

Huge Production Network

Complicated Software

More about Y! Server Software

Y! Server Software: 1994-1995

Y! Server Software: 1996-1998

Y! Server Software: 1999-2000

Tradeoffs: App Logic in C++

Example: my.yahoo.com

Yahoo! in 2002

Yahoo!’s Open Source Paradox

Are We Re-inventing the Wheel?

Costs of Proprietary Languages

Moving to Open Source

Choosing a Language

Language Criteria

Why not Apache mod_include?

Why not ASP or Cold Fusion?

Why not Perl?

Why not JSP, Servlets, or J2EE?

Why not XSLT or ClearSilver?

So Why Did We Pick PHP?

Benchmarking PHP

Performance Tests

Performance Tests

Performance: Requests

Performance: Transfer Rate

Performance: Processing Time

Performance: Memory

Performance: Scaling PHP

Lessons Learned

Early Adopters

Coding PHP Takes Discipline

PHP != Perl

Giving Back to Open Source

Questions and Answers

Legal Mumbo-Jumbo