PHP. To be or not to be. Or. To use or not to use.

This comes as a result of discussion in the newsgroups.

Is PHP slow or fast? Is PHP an advanced enough language to consider it to be a serious platform?

Well, accordingly to information available on PHP.NET web-site there are about 20,000,000 domains running PHP as of today.

http://www.php.net/usage.php

PHP is 5th popular language in the world after Java, C, C++ and VB. We cannot say the same about Delphi, which comes 13th:

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

There is more statistics here

http://www.nexen.net/chiffres_cles/phpversion/16990-php_statistics_for_april_2007.php

Well. Why question was raised?

There is this misconception about PHP not being serious enough language with luck of features and slow speed.
This is simply not true. Or: it is true about any language or software platform when it comes to implementation. Bad code can be written with any language. Some has better protection against bad practices (Hurray for Delphi and Pascal!!!) but it comes to knowing what you are doing.

Can you write better code with PHP? Definitely!

First, PHP is something which produces HTML for you, so make sure that HTML you are producing is fast. Can you use JS, CSS where appropriately? Use them. It will improve your visitor’s experience. Use cached pages. List might be endless here…

This is something to read about benchmark of PHP code and what to avoid.

http://php-mag.net/itr/online_artikel/psecom,id,546,nodeid,114.html

Also visit http://us2.php.net/tut.php and read around for good and bad practices.
Also see into using closest to newest version since your speed improvement will be significant

http://sebastian-bergmann.de/archives/634-PHP-GCC-ICC-Benchmark.html

I have personally running PHP based web-site since 1998. I can tell you that if there is a lousy code then there is lousy speed.