Outsourcing A 30-50K Project, Need Advice

[Solved_]

I am planning to outsource a project in 30-50k $ range.

 

Hope you can help me with the following 3 questions:

 

1. Should I use a framework or not? Like cakephp. What does this mean for performance, scalability?

 

2. How can I be sure about performance, I want to build a marketplace with some advanced functions (lots of db requests/writing), using all ajax. How to be sure the application will be fast, if used by 5k users at a time?

 

3. In the development phase is scaling server capacity involved in the php/mysql coding process, or can this be done later, no matter what kind of application is written?

 

Great thanks in advance.

Edited November 23, 2012 by Solved_

[Adam]

1) I would advise to use a framework like Symfony2, over CakePHP. Frameworks will always add a considerable overhead, but will also make future changes much easier to manage, and provide a set of common libraries so devs aren't wasting their time. The benchmarks I've seen for Symfony2 are also pretty impressive.

 

2) As for how you can be confident about performance, any devs worth their salt should really be taking performance into consideration from the ground up, but you can have them benchmark everything to be sure. When finding your devs (assuming you haven't already), you'll want to ensure you find those with a history of similar experience. However when you reach the 5k current users level, you'll most likely scale horizontally to support that level of activity, so you'll want to ensure your platforms ops are up to scratch too.

 

3) It can be. Depends where the bottle necks in your system are. Again, benchmarking and monitoring your infrastructure activity should highlight where you need to concentrate your efforts.

[xylex]

There isn't a one size fits all solution to performance and scalability, and only dealing with bottlenecks as they arise (like #3) can quickly add significant amounts time and expense. The biggest factor here is going to be finding someone with the experience and knowledge to anticipate where the bottlenecks for your specific requirements are most likely to show up and pre-addressing them in their architecture. There are plenty of best practices and methods used to scale and be performant, experience is going to be the factor in knowing which ones apply and should be implemented.