When not to use PHP?

 

When you need to work with large amounts of data.

One drawback of PHP is that it's not good with large amounts of data. It is a server-side scripting language and some of the common tasks it performs are slow, even on faster servers. If you have a project that will be handling large amounts of data, you should consider Python or Java for building your web application.

With PHP being a server-side scripting language, it's not fast when processing large amounts of data. It has to send the results to your browser in small chunks so that they can be easily processed by your computer and displayed as web pages. With big amounts of data, this process takes a long time and slows down your application significantly. That's why PHP is not good at multitasking: running multiple processes simultaneously drains memory resources from each other and makes them slow down drastically.

PHP is also not fit for real-time applications: the time it takes for the information to get transferred back and forth makes it impossible for you to create web apps that work in real time (think about video chat or live communication).

If web security is important for you, PHP might not be the best option either—the lack of automatic checks over code quality leads to vulnerabilities which may compromise your application if exploited by malicious users

Retrieval can be an issue while working with large amounts of data.

• Your application doesn't require a lot of data. We all love using PHP because it's easy to learn and simple to execute commands with, but one of its biggest issues is that it's not compatible with large databases. If you need to work with a significant amount of data—if you're creating an app that tracks sales or manages a customer database, for example—it's best to use another language like C++ instead.

• If your database is still large but the amount of users isn't. One way around this problem would be to use PHP only when working with medium-sized datasets—say, no more than 100 items at once. Connecting your PHP code with larger databases can cause issues and may even slow down performance if there are several users attempting to access information simultaneously.

If your application requires a real-time processing capability.

• Are you looking for a fast, lightweight, non-blocking, event-driven framework? Are you building a real time application? Then it's time to choose another programming language. PHP is synchronous and single-threaded. It will block other requests until the first request is finished because of how Apache processes PHP. Blocking calls in PHP are not suitable for CPU intensive applications and real-time apps like online games or chat apps. That’s why Python with its asynchronous model is better suited for these types of applications.

When you require multi-threaded app development.

Single-threaded languages are great if you're just doing basic, quick scripts but they're no good for developing multi-threaded apps. In order to do that, you need a language that supports threads like Java, C# or Python.

When the speed is the determining factor.

Not all applications are created equal. Neither are you and me. Some of us need to be fast, like in a race. Others need to make sure their data is safe, like in a bank. Still others have to maintain so much information that they have no choice but to be heavy, like an elephant at the zoo.

If your application falls into one of the latter categories, then PHP might not be the best choice for you. Obviously, speed is a big issue for most applications. The general rule is that if an average user waits more than three seconds for your app to load and respond, they're likely going to abandon it completely and go find something else that's faster. Unfortunately, PHP apps aren't known as being particularly fast compared with other languages (like C++ or Java). Luckily there are ways we can improve how quickly our PHP apps respond by using something called a PHP accelerator and caching—I'll talk about those later on in this article.

Security is a critical aspect of web applications, and PHP isn't highly secure.

PHP is a very easy to learn, easy to use, and well-documented language. This makes PHP an attractive choice for novice web developers with limited experience. It can also lull developers into a false sense of security. PHP is not compiled, so it is possible to make mistakes without knowing it until you run the application and break things. PHP will run even if you have made a mistake in your code, but the resulting product may be ugly or nonexistent! The lack of compile errors is part of what makes PHP so easy to use – but it also means that beginners are more prone to making mistakes.

PHP has limited capabilities when working with large amounts of data, multitasking, and many other aspects.

PHP, as a language with limited capabilities when working with large amounts of data, multitasking and many other aspects, might not be your choice for a number of applications. You should first consider the following:

• Do you want to use PHP for high-performance applications? If you do, please go ahead and try it out. But on conditions that you need to test it thoroughly in advance and that you have an alternate plan if your code shows poor performance.

• Do you require real-time response from your application? If yes then PHP might not be the right choice in this case. Being a server-side scripting language, PHP is all about sending requests to the server and receiving responses back. This means waiting time will always be there while processing a request, which is a significant drawback in real-time apps like chat applications or stock tickers etc.

• Are you going to deal with large datasets? Again - go ahead and test what works best for your application but remember that memory footprint of PHP objects is quite high compared to other languages so managing large datasets may turn out to be inefficient.