[Phpwm] Opportunity to teach your PHP knowledge to me

[Phil Beynon]

> > My first question is, do any of you have real-world experience
> of very busy
> > websites written in the aforementioned systems, and would MYSQL
> hold up to
> > the possibility of thousands of hits a day.
>
>
> Yes; see various very busy sites - e.g. Slashdot and Digg.com
> (Slashdot uses Perl / MySQL, while Digg uses PHP/MySQL (I think)).
>
> > If not, I would have to look at
> > using something like Oracle from the outset in order to save time and
> > problems later on.
> >
>
> There would be no need; unless you need functionality only Oracle can
> provide. If you find MySQL does not offer enough functionality for you,
> check out PostgreSQL. If PostgreSQL doesn't suffice then check out e.g.
> Oracle.
>
> I'd suggest you avoid over optimising your site from the beginning, as
> it can be hard to spot bottlenecks in advance. Once you have a working
> site, then start to optimise it using e.g. apc, memcached, tweaked
> Apache settings, tweaked MySQL settings etc.
>
> > Secondly, I feel that while I could write my own site, I might not have
> > enough real-world experience of writing PHP code to be able to think of
> > every scenario at the outset.  I wonder then if one of you PHP guru's
> > wouldn't mind me becoming your apprentice (for want of a better
> word) where
> > I could be involved in the writing of some PHP code with the goal of
> > strengthening my skills, or, if it was far above my level of experience,
> > would someone be willing to help by writing the site (with me assisting
> > where I can as I want to learn as I go along).  Of course money
> would be an
> > incentive (how much I don't know as we were told today that our
> site might
> > be 20 man-days of coding).
>
> I'm sure there are plenty of people on this list who could provide this
> help (myself included).
>
> >
> > Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on this, along with
> information on
> > what the going rate is these days for a PHP/MySQL Developer.
>
> As far as I can tell it varies widely - it depends on what attributes
> and experience you are seeking.
>
> Thanks,
> David.

There's 86,400 seconds in a day - if you got 8500 hits a day in the main 12
hours of the day (assuming its not a global site here) thats only one hit
every 5 seconds. Unless it was doing something really major with the HDD or
was very memory intensive I'd not be too bothered about it. :-)
One way of keeping things running cool is to ensure any variables and search
results that are finished with are unset() from memory.
A lot of it will depend on exactly what you are intending though, I wrote a
concentric adjacent postcode mapping system for a customer's site which
could really nail a slower server.

Phil