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Comment by Isinlor | Hacker News Reader

PHP share-nothing architecture is awesome. It's amazingly simple and it scales to arbitrary size.

Complicated frameworks means the “shared nothing architecture” is unusable and you have to use fcgi/fpm to get acceptable performances out of your website.

At which point there’s little difference from <everything else>.

"Acceptable" is different for different folks. I don't understand the general sentiment of either you have enterprise level performance or it's a fail. Not everyone is building next Facebook or Amazon and yet most developers think that they are and vastly overestimate their needs. Also most hosting provides already have fpm configured for you and if you need to do it yourself for your VPS then it's not complicated.

What's wrong with FastCGI? PHP provides a CGI-like model regardless of which interface to the web server is actually used.

As I understand it, adding fpm doesn't change the "shared nothing architecture" as each request is isolated from the other. There is no application server that can potentially store state between requests.

PHP has a deep history of less than ideal defaults and Tutorials/Examples. This makes scaling a codebase without some kind of framework (even if homegrown) even more of a challenge.

And in my opinion PHP tends to be ugly and less readable by default.

PHP did not invent CGI and the whole selling point of mod_php was "share-something" architecture.

For the PHP-side application developer, PHP is in 99% of use cases shared-nothing no matter the hosting environment - CGI, FCGI, FPM, mod_php. The exceptions are persistent socket (database) related, obviously you don't have these in a CGI environment.

The mod_php "share-something" question was always more relevant for ops people.

Obviously it's share something e.g. session state and database state.

But architecture of PHP applications is simple and it works. I like simple.

> PHP share-nothing architecture is awesome

There's nothing PHP specific about share-nothing architecture. It's often refereed to as stateless application layer in other camps.

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