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I remember a few years back, when I had a web-site I wanted to develop, that many people recommended I go the LAMP route. Unfortunately, I never got around to studying/practicing that.

I'm currently revisiting the web-site idea.

The web-site will be dynamic, transactional, and hopefully end up with around 1,000,000 pv/mo and 300,000 members within 18 months. Will LAMP adequately support a site like that (i.e. have you seen it under a site with those specs)?

vartec
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Telis Duvoir
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    I'm sure LAMP will be fine, if it's set up properly. – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner Jun 21 '11 at 14:15
  • LAMP isn't what you should be worried about. Your problem is likely to be hardware/bandwidth related. If you put LAMP on a top notch box, you'll have no problem. If you throw it on a P2 450Mhz machine, forget about it. – Joel Etherton Jun 21 '11 at 14:17
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    "Regarding PHP..." This should be asked as a separate question. Or you should conduct a search to see if a similar question has been asked before. – Ciaran Jun 21 '11 at 14:20
  • **davidhaskins** has definitively resolved the viability of LAMP for my project. But the question regarding PHP remains. – Telis Duvoir Jun 21 '11 at 14:26
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    @Telis Duvoir you should take a look at some other questions on the site. It has been asked many times. – Nic Jun 21 '11 at 14:27
  • @Ciaran: Absolutely correct. Should I edit my question, and then perhaps post a new question (after research)? – Telis Duvoir Jun 21 '11 at 14:37
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    300,000 members and a million page views per month? One of these numbers isn't realistic and I don't know which. – mmyers Jun 21 '11 at 15:33
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    @Telis Duvoir - yes to editing and posting a new question. But a search will reveal a lot of similar questions, I think. – Ciaran Jun 21 '11 at 15:51
  • You realize that 1MM page views amortized over only half the business days in a month (which is a pessimistic assumption) is down to barely more than 1 request per second average. Even if you consider a peak of 10 times that, it is still a trivial amount of traffic for any well-designed web application. – Jeremy Jun 21 '11 at 17:42

4 Answers4

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Yes. 1M pv/mo is not that much. LAMP can handle that without any problem, as long as you create your site according to best practices. Which means multi-level caching, client side optimization etc.

Recommended reading:

Community
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vartec
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  • As this is the accepted answer, I'll include my research on PHP for total closure: it appears that Java or C#/.NET would be more beneficial career-wise. [Popularity of related languages based on job listings](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+C%23%2C+Perl%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C+asp.net%2C+php&l=) – Telis Duvoir Jun 21 '11 at 15:24
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    @Telis: It should be noted that ASP.NET is not a language, it's a development framework. You write ASP.NET applications in C# or VB.NET. – Adam Robinson Jun 21 '11 at 15:31
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While it is great to think long term, I think by the time you hit 1,000,000pv/mo you should have a wonderful group of system administrators that can better handle the server side. You'll have a lot more considerations then, like caching, clustering, and etc that are better left for people whose focus is specifically on servers.

Edit: don't get me wrong, I think it's absolutely essential that you are familiar with what your server does and be able to manage it to a point - but you should stick to what you do best.

Nic
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I believe Facebook runs on a LAMP stack. You'll be fine.

edited to add: obviously, Facebook runs a customized LAMP stack, but they still run Linux,Apache,MySQL, and PHP.

davidhaskins
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  • Looks like you are right! Here's the reference link to prove it: [How Facebook Runs Its LAMP Stack](http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/04/11/1142246/How-Facebook-Runs-Its-LAMP-Stack) – Telis Duvoir Jun 21 '11 at 14:22
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    -1: Facebook is very, very long way from running plain LAMP stack. And even in this 3-years old presentation they talk about LAMP not being enough for them. See from 0:44m – vartec Jun 21 '11 at 14:34
  • Downvote for the reason @vartec lists – Max Jun 21 '11 at 14:50
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    The caveat added to your question is akin to "Obviously, NASCAR drivers drive heavily-modified, barely-related versions of production vehicles. But they still drive production vehicles." It's an answer (and a caveat) that is more misleading than helpful. – Adam Robinson Jun 21 '11 at 15:10
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    FB doesn't run normal PHP, but rather their HipHop. FB doesn't run standard MySQL, but heavily modified version. And where MySQL isn't fast enough they use Cassandra. For caching and volatile storage they use memcache. For services like eg. messaging they use Erlang, which has absolutely nothing in common with LAMP. Whole thing runs on tens of thousands of servers. So sorry, saying that FB is just LAMP is saying that nuclear bomb is very big firecracker. – vartec Jun 21 '11 at 15:26
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livestrong.com runs on LAMP, it reportedly gets 4.7 million PVs per day:

$ curl -I http://www.livestrong.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) PHP/5.2.5
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:28:18 GMT
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:28:18 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Robert
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