What is more scaleable: php or asp?

[calbear2000]

I know enterprise prefers asp, but is it safe to conclude asp is more scaleable to handle huge databases and massive traffic?

All the social networking sites appear to be written in php, and I've heard php architecture is inherently faster.

Any thoughts/comments?

 

[Matthias99]

'Scalability' of things like this is almost always dependent on the efficiency and speed of the server-side implementation. You can have a very, very scalable ASP.NET backend, or a very, very unscalable PHP backend. Also, 'massive traffic' can mean many different things -- lots of connections with little traffic, few connections with LOTS of data transferred on each one, extremely frequent disconnect/reconnects with low response times needed, etc, etc. Often, optimizing specifically for one type of traffic hurts performance with others.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the current state of either to comment on them. But my answer would be "either, depending on what the server end of it is capable of handling".

 

[iotone]

I would have to agree with Matthias99... I know that MySpace uses ColdFusion, and I'm not sure if it was ever meant to scale to that size and volume (there are some tricks in there to help, but I can't really mention them as I'm a former employee )

Like Matthias99 said, it does depend on the efficiency and speed of the server-side implementation, as it does all of the work... the browser really just reads the final product. Case in point, CF 4.5 was written in C++ (IIRC), and when it went to 5.5 or 6 I think it was, it was re-written in Java. CF 6 had more features than 4.5, but it always felt that 4.5 was much faster as the Java implementation just seemed slower.

It also really does depend on what you mean by 'scalability'... My opinion is that different languages can handle different types of traffic/volume, you just need to find the right one to match.

 

[Markbnj]

Matthias hit the nail on the head, imo. I know some _very_ big transactional websites that run on an ASP-based architecture for the front-end (NASDAQ is one), and there are also very large PHP based sites. It all depends on the efficiency of the implementation.