Php/mysql is there a better combo?

I thought this would be an easy topic to find information about, but I couldn't really find out what I wanted to know. There is a lot of information about php and a lot about mysql. There is even a lot of information about php and mysql together. But I can't find anything that compares php/mysql to php/oracle or asp/oracle. Anyways what I really want to know is what do big web sites like about.com and howstuffworks.com use and why. I've been working on making a website similar to about.com for some time with just a couple of topics that I know about and a simple blog isn't enough. It seems when I use php/mysql even though I have about 100th of the information to query through my website is slower than about.com by a lot. So I'm wondering if its because they are using better languages/aplications or my coding just isn't that great.

There are too many factors involved to fully answer this question. There's more to a website, particuarly when you start talking about speed, than the underlying code and database. They are both important, but they are not the only factors. And don't forget the business factors, like cost.

Take a look at some of MySQL's customers and their websites. How many of them are slow? Is that b/c they code better than you? Honestly, most likely that's part of it. But they also have the funds to have the best hardware and fastest backbone, load balanced servers in high-end, multi-OC line data centers.

There are ways to speed up MySQL queries, like having proper INDEXes. If you're going to have a lot of database activity, you might need a separate database server. You can also cache database results, preventing the need to repeat common queries.

Then there are ways to increase a website, like dedicated high end servers, cached pages, even kernel tweaks.

As you can see ... lots of factors.

Well I know that hardware would make a huge difference if my website was getting the amount of hits that about.com was getting. I thought that if I was just comparing one hit on my site to one hit on there website (which they are probably getting at least 10 other queries at that time and my server is only dealing with one) that since mine has so much less information to work with it should be as fast. I know hardware makes a huge difference, but I just think that about and howstuffworks are using something other then php/mysql. And since my website is similar to theirs, I'd think I could assume that whatever they are using would be best for me as well.

All I really need to know is what is the best way to build a website like about.com. I've been using php and mysql but I feel like I'm a step behind what big websites are using.

Is Google not a big enough company to compare?

Yes google is big enough. But google uses a custom RDBMS and its own operating system. I don't think I'm capable of that, but I don't think thats what all big companies are doing, is it?

Is there anyway to find out what RDBMS and programming language a website uses? That would make this a lot easier because I could probably find the answers to my own questions.

Can anyone just tell me if about and howstuffworks and similar web sites are using php/mysql or something totally different like google. I doubt that all web sites similar are going to be using the exact same combo. But just in general are they using php/mysql or a similar combo or are they using something totally different?

Which you would do by reading, right? You might try reading some of the links from the MySQL's customers link I previously posted.

I'm guessing that that is a pretty reliable source. But I read at tons of different places that yahoo! and google don't use mysql they use a costum RDBMS they made just for thier own purposes. So does google not use mysql or do they? And also if they do is there a website like that for ASP, PHP, Oracle, etc.. costomers? That would make this all a lot easier since its probably hard for you to know exactly what I'm trying to find out.

Yahoo uses PHP/MySQL. Wikipedia uses PHP/MySQL. Big enough yet?

However, as Jeremy said, it's almost impossible to answer this question - it depends on what you're doing with the database, what you're storing, how it's designed, what table types you're using, what caching you've got going on, what types of queries you're doing, etc etc etc.


Next, as J. mentioned, when you're talking about websites with hundreds of hits per second, then you're probably not using one webserver talking to one database server running on the same machine, but probably a cloud of webservers ( some optimised for static content, some for dynamic content ), a cluster of database servers replicating each other, on some high-spec'd, RAM-laden server-grade hardware, all connected to each other and the internet with some very fat pipes.

The content you see on about.com/yahoo.com will be largely cached (either implicitly by the database or explicitly with something like memcached) and regenerated once every, say, few seconds.

I'll say this - your choice of language and RDBMS is irrelevant, what is important is how well things are written and how well the database is used appropriately for the task.

For some really rough comparisons, php is one of the faster languages out there & mysql is one of the faster rdbmses out there ( for selects on MyISAM tables - performance drops for others ). BUT Speed is not necessarily important especially when you're looking for scalability, and is often a bad thing ( more speed usually means more ram, which means less concurrancy = bad ). Something like Postgres should scale better than MySQL, especially for more complex read/write accesses.

--Simon