How Scalable is Codeigniter V Other PHP Frameworks? [closed]

Question

How Scalable is Codeigniter V Other PHP Frameworks? I'm new to Codeigniter and love to know how scalable it is when compared to other PHP Frameworks?

Brachyuran

Scalable in what aspect? – Tormentor

possible duplicate of What is the best PHP MVC framework for scalability? – Nabalas

@mario: In all fairness, that thread is over two years old. – Alpinist

Codeigniter (I talk about version 3) can be scalable if you develop/made your app to be scalable from the beginning. You have to handle the session and storage to support load balancing, etc. – Cell

Answer 1

CodeIgniter is massively scalable because it does very little. That might sound slightly ridiculous coming from a CodeIgniter enthusiast but that is exactly why I love it.

CodeIgniter is ridiculously lightweight. It has no conventions, no real overhead and has been reccomended by Rasmus as the most lightweight framework around.

Scalability is about growing your application, in traffic, performance and general size. General size does not matter as it only loads what you load, traffic is fine with some correct caching and performance works brilliantly as I have already pointed out: it is light as hell.

I have a bunch of websites ranked 100,000 and higher on Alexa and they haven't struggled yet.

Banana

Thanks for the comment and insight as always. Out of curiosity, have you ever used Kohana? If so, what about it did you wish CI had, and what about it did you hate? Vague questions, I know, but I'm curious to see what you think. – Alpinist

I have used Kohana to build a few apps and it was both enjoyable and hugely frustrating. I really love their Cascading File System and the PHP5 models (and autoloading in general) was a lovely change from $this->load. Sadly it's undocumented and a bit of a mess. Look at FuelPHP fuelphp.com for the perfect mixture of CI, Kohana, Rails and others. – Banana

Answer 2

Generally when speaking of Scalability, most people tend to think in one direction and that is in terms of growth. Many frameworks handle growth fine, but CI's strong suit is being able to control the footprint of the framework to scale both up AND down depending on the use. You, the developer have ultimate control over resource efficiency and this generally means that even as your application grows, you retain this control, so that even if your application demands it, you can continue to utilize resources accordingly.

Ask 10 Web Application Developers and you'll probably get 4 or 5 different answers going along with the tags you used.

And it's a chicken or the egg question when you ask if they are using it because the like it, or like it because they use it.

Tormentor

Answer 3

CodeIgniter is for PHP4. Kohana is the best choice out of those you have tagged. CI is great but I don't know how scalable can it be comparing to these.

Cliffcliffes

That is bull, CodeIgniter 2.0 no longer supports PHP4. CI has beat Kohana in every benchmark I have come across, but I am always happy to see now ones. – Banana

Ok, where is the Download CI 2.0 button? – Hermie

@webarto: download the latest tip from here: bitbucket.org/ellislab/codeigniter – Alpinist

@Phil @webarto Though I do wish there was a more obvious way to get to that link from the website. I haven't found any issues with CI 2.0 that weren't there in 1.x – Alpinist

@webarto This is not accurate. As Phil has noted CI 2 is dropping support for PHP 4 and even of you use 1.7.3 you can use PHP 5.x if your server supports it. – Upstairs

Okay, seems logical, I meant for current stable releases, doesn't matter. Like @Tormentor stated, a chicken or egg question. – Hermie

@Phil Can you show me these benchmarks please? – Trivium

CI 2 has been on BitBucket for months now and its generally known that the framework is stable enough to use. The community edition (and most likely 2.0) will be out in January. @Trivium cant remember where I saw those benchmarks but it was months ago so you can strike those from the record. – Banana

beyondcoding.com/2009/03/02/… , sheldmandu.com/php/php-mvc-frameworks/… , comparing to kohana 2.x, current stable release is 3.0.8., we'll just have to wait for Kohana3 vs CI2 :) Cheers. – Hermie

Hah! first time i've ever heard of a technology being knocked for being backward compatible. – Tormentor