Last weekend, we completed the move on our site, www.clickforlessons.com, from .NET ASP to LINUX/PHP. We did this to take advantage and contribute to the open source community and to prepare for scalability down the road.
The initial results are showing that our site is running about 60% faster now. Here is a comparison chart of three main pages of our site and the size before and after. Overall, it’s a 25% savings site-wide on performance. If you take into account that we are now showing more pictures on the "City-Category" page, we think the savings is more like 35-45%.
Some have said that it’s faster because the pages are smaller. This is partially true. But overall, we were able to get the same functionality with less code. Everything is tighter. Even after you take page size into account in the calculations, the site runs faster.
I can’t say whether it helps other sites or not. What I can say is that it helped our site. Speed is great, but just as important for me (as the business guy) was the costs as the site scales.
The chart doesn’t make a lot of sense given the premise. It appears that most of your performance gains came from serving smaller web pages. Couldn’t you have done the same thing with .NET (or MONO on Linux?)
We’ve recently moved the majority of our websites off of Window with IIS to Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. The change has made our websites easier to develop and maintain, improved performance, improved reliability, and improved security. Not only did we switch to Linux but we switched to virtualization so that all of our Linux and Windows servers can run on a single physical Linux server instead of on several aging physical machines.
We’re developing a new site currently and development is so much cheaper and easier than if we’d stuck to our offerings from Microsoft. The only thorn in our side is a proprietary inventory system that we have to interact with that runs on Windows. It is slow and unreliable. Luckily the company also offers AIX support so in the near future we’ll be moving that system to Unix too.
A couple other alternatives, other than PHP, are Python and Ruby. Packages like Rails (Ruby) and Django (Python) are very powerful and feel like PHP on steroids. Why would anyone want to suffer and limit themselves with .NET is beyond me. They deserve what they get. 😛