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Comment by padde | Hacker News Reader

Nice write-up :) I'll probably adopt some of these fancy new tools like nginx or munin (that you call old) some day... still running good old Apache + php, postfix, dovecot, irssi, ... I think my box (in its various reincarnations, first as dedicated server, then as VM on a bigger dedicated server that I shared with friends, and now as cloud VM) has been running since ~2005. Now I feel old ;)

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Same here. It's amazing how many services you can easily host if they are on PHP and low traffic.

The beauty of PHP is that more services consume no additional resources until they are used. This lets you run many many services without worrying about resource usage. In stark contrast to running everything in containers where you have at least a process per idle service.

I ran servers with 100000s of sites/applications per server and indeed php made that possible. I had a complex setup with jails/chroots and selinux and some customizations to the mysql, apache and php source to make sure users couldn't abuse things. With nodejs or whatever, we would've ran a huge loss, now we ran a nice profit.

When people go on about environmental issues and such, I cannot help to think all the useless cycles spent by 'modern software'. FaaS helps I guess. But that is not really unlike CGI; with my old setup it is actually practically the same but mine was less flexible (php only).

Why does php not need to idle?

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