Paul Rubin said the following on 2/3/2005 7:20 PM:
LAMP = Linux/Apache/MySQL/P{ython,erl,HP}. Refers to the general class of database-backed web sites built using those components. This being c.l.py, if you want, you can limit your interest to the case the P stands for Python.
I notice that lots of the medium-largish sites (from hobbyist BBS's to sites like Slashdot, Wikipedia, etc.) built using this approach are painfully slow even using seriously powerful server hardware. Yet compared to a really large site like Ebay or Hotmail (to say nothing of Google), the traffic levels on those sites is just chickenfeed.
If you are talking about Wikipedia as a prime example, I agree with you that it is *painfully* slow.
And the reason for that I probably because of the way the language is used (PHP) (this is a shot in the dark as I have not looked into Mediawiki code), and compounded by probably an unoptimized database. I don't want to start flame wars here about PHP; I use PHP to build client sites and like it for the "easy building of dynamic sites" but the downside is that there is no "memory"...every page is compiled each time a request is made. I doubt if Wikipedia site uses an optimizer (like Zend) or caching mechanisms. Optimizers and/or PHP caches make a huge performance difference.
Mmcache (which is both optimizer and shared memory caching library for php) can do _miracles_. One of my company servers uses Apache 1.3/php/mmcache to serve about 100 GB of dynamic content a day (it could do more but website does not have enough visitors to stress it :) ).
There's also memcached, much more of interest to readers of this list - iirc it has Python API.
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