Which PHP frameworks can handle large scale applications?

Many conversations on frameworks tend to discuss ease of use and speed of development. These issues are important but they tend to come from developers who are creating new low traffic projects over and over for different clients. It is important in that situation to be able to knock out a solid solution for the client in as little time as possible. I myself have operated in this area for many years and have used many MVC frameworks with much successes.

But what about when you are working on a single high traffic application for several years? Now ease of use and speed of development start to take a back seat to scala开发者_JS百科bility and speed. It doesn't matter how easy it is to use or how fast you can write code if the application won't function because of speed and scale.

My question to any large scale developers out there is, are frameworks still useful in this situation and if so which have been used successfully in large scale production situations?

common frameworks: zend, symphony, codeignitor, cakephp

When it comes to large applications, it's not the framework you should be concerned about, it's the database.

First decide which database you going to use, then look for a framework that has good support for that database. If you want your app to scale to unlimited size and still be fast, you should eliminate Mysql as an option right from the start.

Look for NoSQL solution, find the one that you like. Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB are the top 3 choices, but there are others. All of these are fairly new, but some of the biggest sites in the Internet are using them. Do your research, choose database, then choose framework.

I don't know most of the frameworks, I looked at Zend and Symphony2, both support MongoDB, both are pretty fast. I would look at either one of these 2, no reason to look anywhere else.

But really, if you plan on writing a really large application you should really write your own code and don't use frameworks. This way you will have only the functions that you need and none of functions you don't need. Remember most frameworks offer you a lot more functionality then you really need. Unnecessary functionality usually slows down your app. if you want a fast app, then it has to be lean, only do what you need and nothing else.

symfony is used by Yahoo on it's Bookmarks and Answers site. You should note they ditched the ORM so the database remains as the main concern for scaling (as Dmitri stated), you can read more about it here.

Dailymotion is also using symfony.

My question to any large scale developers out there is, are frameworks still useful in this situation and if so which have been used successfully in large scale production situations?

I've seen symfony-based applications successfully scale up to many thousands of users so is a strong candidate.

The creator of php liked codeigniter(in the past) the best, because it is the fastest framework when he benchmarked it. You can listen to video about that over here.

To add on to what the others have already said:

You can start off with any framework as your starting point. As your application gets bigger (and I mean, BIG), you can start modifying the framework and customizing it to your application's specific needs. After all, frameworks are a general solution to most problems.

You should pick whatever framework you're most comfortable with, and tailor it to your needs if your application ever grows extremely large. No point worrying about a million visitors when you don't have them yet.

WordPress.com is about the 22nd most popular website in the world and it runs on (you guessed it) WordPress, which is a framework with a large amount of overhead. So it definitely is possible.

Whether you are using a framework or not, you end up working on the same kinds of problems as your site gets to massive scale. Building on top of a framework means that you'll have one less problem (no custom framework to write) while working on other scaling issues. However, you may have to extend or tweak that framework to work with whatever technology you need to scale.

And in general, what I would recommend is that you don't blaze your own path. Find an app or site that is comparable to the one you are building and figure out what technology and techniques they used to build that site (many like WordPress.com, Twitter, Google projects are well documented or have chatty developers) and use the same technologies and techniques. You'll benefit from them figuring everything out ahead of time.