Scaling methodologies for a high traffic app?

[extrovertive]

We have a new project for a web app that will display banners ads on websites (as a network) and our estimate is for it to handle 10 to 20 billion impressions a month (yes, billions not millions).

 

Our current language is in ASP...but are moving to PHP. Does PHP 5 has its limit with scaling web application? Or, should I have our team invest in picking up JSP?

 

Or, is the issue a matter of the app server and/or DB? We plan to use Oracle 10g as the database.

 

[corbin]

With 250k-ish requests per second, you're going to need a crap load of high end hardware no matter what language you use.

 

 

In all honest, I'm not totally sure which language would perform better (assume the quality of the code is uniform).  ASP.NET can be compiled (unless I'm entirely retarded and dreamed that at some point....), and JSP is half-way compiled, so they have that going as advantages.  PHP can have an op code cache though, so that almost negates ASP.NET's advantage, and pretty much does negate JSP's advantage.

 

 

 

I think as long as the scripts are well written the language won't matter much.  If you were really concerned with performance, you could write it in C ;p.

 

 

 

 

 

But uhmmm....  I hate to be a hater, but do you really expect to get 10-20 billion impressions a month?  No offense, but...  lol.

[extrovertive]

So, I guess it's more on the hardware issue?

 

Btw, it's a advertisement system where the app/banner will be exposed on big name sites (i.e. myspace, facebook, yahoo, etc) - so yes, we're just preparing in case if your traffic gets that much.

[KevinM1]

ASP.NET can be compiled (unless I'm entirely retarded and dreamed that at some point....)

 

To quote the recently departed Ed McMahon, you are correct, sir.

[corbin]

So, I guess it's more on the hardware issue?

 

Btw, it's a advertisement system where the app/banner will be exposed on big name sites (i.e. myspace, facebook, yahoo, etc) - so yes, we're just preparing in case if your traffic gets that much.

 

 

Well, in that case, yeah, you might get a crap load of hits ;p.

 

 

Anyway, if you're receiving 8k hits a second (15,000,000,000/30/24/60/60 = ~5787), you're going to need more than 1 server.  I'm sure you've already realized that though since you were asking about scalability.  And in response to your question, PHP has no issues scaling out of 1 server except for 1 thing:

 

You must use a custom session handler since by default they're saved to file.  (You could technically set the session location to 1 network location, but that would cause locking issues.)

 

As for the other languages, I would imagine they all have the same problem with sessions, although it's not even that big of issue.

[Daniel0]

You must use a custom session handler since by default they're saved to file.  (You could technically set the session location to 1 network location, but that would cause locking issues.)

 

As for the other languages, I would imagine they all have the same problem with sessions, although it's not even that big of issue.

 

You could easily store the sessions in a cluster of servers running memcached. I'm not sure why you would use sessions if you''re just going to display ads though.

[corbin]

You must use a custom session handler since by default they're saved to file.  (You could technically set the session location to 1 network location, but that would cause locking issues.)

 

As for the other languages, I would imagine they all have the same problem with sessions, although it's not even that big of issue.

 

You could easily store the sessions in a cluster of servers running memcached. I'm not sure why you would use sessions if you''re just going to display ads though.

 

 

Eh, not sure why you would either.  I actually thought about memcached, and I meant to mention it as an option, but then I forgot about it about 3 seconds later.  I think I had been planning to mention it in general as a suggestion, but then forgot.