PHP Architectures that power your favourite big websites

Note : this thread in in reply to the query posted in this same section titled novice:which web programming language to learn?

The next time someone asks you what language you work on , don't fret to say that you work on PHP . I've been doing some research on building high performance websites. And how PHP ,from a web development perspective is involved in truly scalable architectures. And for those investing their career in web development - PHP 's rising presence is evident from the programming index maintained annually .

From the smallest you can think of , to the biggest sites out there - use PHP . Ofcourse there are other things to learn like caching , harware and software load balancing , clustering / replication / federation / sharding of databases , choosing between flat files vs rdbms , proxies , mirroring , and so on.

To make a site that really scales, you can defintely find success with PHP as your prefered scripting language. Some of the few companies that use PHP are :


Flickr

1. Flickr and PHP
2. Flickr Architecture

Yahoo

1. Making the case for PHP at Yahoo.(talk from 2002)
2. One year of PHP at Yahoo (talk from 2003)
3. Large Scale PHP

Digg

1. Digg
2. How Digg uses LAMP
3. Digg Architecture
4. Digg PHP's Scalability and Performance

Facebook

1. PHP's APC at Facebook
2. Facebook Internals

TechEnclave
,and tens of thousands of other forums (Comparison of Internet forum software using PHP ), wiki' s , websites .

Misc. PHP web architecture links

1. Wikimedia architecture
2. Zend Developer Zone: A Review of "Scalable Internet Architectures"
3. High Performance PHP
4. Friendstar switching from JSP to PHP
5. PHP Development From Java Architects Eye
6. Getting Rich with PHP
7. James Gosling, the "father of Java," commenting on PHP
8. Nice blog at procata
9. Scalable PHP with APC, memcached and LVS

Building scalable applications is an art in itself . And if you become a master of designing high performance applications in PHP or any language for that matter - you rule 8 ) .

Nice compilation. very informative

Just to add to this, Welcome to Gaia Online runs phpBB and is world's largest forum. Little stats i picked up this morning

However most of these sites run customized version of OS scripts and even php and apache is optimized to suit their requirements.

^^^ hmm any gud blog website....

And add Drupal to that list.
An awesome CMS based on PHP.
Been working on it for a while now and loving it.

drupal is awesome, the modular plugins idea rocks

I follow this guys blog .He apparently works for google .

Stevey's Blog Rants

I like his views on technology n programming n stuff.

Well drupal is not something we can really call as highend. Its an easy to use, no hassles CMS. But by no means its as scalable as the sites listed above. Everyone with 200+ online users have to hack the code or move to something else. But its good coz its free

Its true, it takes some clever caching and some serious server power to make it handle big loads.
But its modularity and endless customisation possibilities are the reasons that makes it attractive.