> If you run it as a cli script, you can implement pretty much anything. I saw a ftp server once. Crazy.

Yeah, I implemented a simple ircd once. Funny days... but I don't know of any library/framework that could help you with the websocket protocol level, and I'm too old for writing my own ;)

Websocket is actually not that complicated. A couple of headers to upgrade the request from HTTP to websocket, then framing of each payload.

But you could use something like websocketd, which spawns a process of your chioce for each client and pipes the websocket to stdin and vice versa.

https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd

Each PHP process looks like it takes about 5 MB of ram on my laptop, so probably not the best method for 5000+ concurrent users if you use PHP, but still.

> I don't know of any library/framework that could help you with the websocket protocol level

FYI - http://socketo.me/

what would be a good hardware spec and server configuration to have 5000 users do long polling with a php backend?

Yes, of course there are easy to use and much better programming languages for that - I just really wanted to read some "real-life" recommendations from that guy that mentioned "php" and "long-polling" in the same sentence.

[Maybe it was just a joke and I did not get it... or I did get it but did not identify it as a joke... however... I would like to see some beef...]

Uh. You do realize that Mediawiki, powering nearly all wiki systems including Wikipedia, is written in PHP. Or Facebook, they were able to go with PHP for iirc 500 M users?

PHP is in any case a better choice, performance-wise, than Python or, god forbid, Java.

Facebook built their own PHP-to-C++ compiler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP) and later a JIT compiler/VM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine), with a custom, typed version of PHP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) ).

All just to make PHP a little faster. I think you are making my case.

HH transpilation was introduced in 2010. Depending on when exactly you look in 2010, FB had between 350-600M active users (https://www.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over...).

Many websites don't ever get to 350M users, so it's safe to say that plain PHP will satisfy your startup for a long time. Also, PHP7 is pretty much on par with HHVM in real-world scenarios: https://kinsta.com/blog/the-definitive-php-7-final-version-h...

Check out "experimental JIT branch" of PHP. It boost performance 1.5-2 times compared to current PHP 7.1, and they didn't start optimization yet. It blows HHVM out of the water, and I can't wait to compare performance with Java and .NET.

And the vast majority of websites never get 5000 concurrent users either. Your planned load obviously dictates the language as much as anything else.

PHP performs better than Java? Care to offer evidence?

Can't disclose much in public, but our PHP CMS hosting requirements tend to be waaaay cheaper than our Java-based CMSes. Also, deployment of PHP apps is (in my experience) faster and easier.

(cheaper hosting || faster deployment) != better performance