[Bostonphptalk] Large Scale PHP Application Design Questions

[Jesse Burns]

How's it going folks. I figured this would be a great place to pick some brains.

I'm about to start working on my first large scale site (in my opinion) that will hopefully have 1000+ users a day. ok, this isn't on the google/facebook scale, but it's going to be have more hits than just family and friends.

Either way, I'm planning on this site blowing up once I have enough of a feature set, so I'm concerned about performance and scalability in the long run.

I've worked for a software company, but I've never programmed PHP professionally (looking for an entry level job, wink wink ).

I was wondering if sites like Sitepoint, MySpace, Facebook, etc... actually use DB abstraction layers and template engines.

I also plan on using the code for this site for my portfolio, so I'd like to have as much original code as possible, that's why I'm not even considering using a framework (I've dabbled a bit with CakePHP and ZF), so I won't bother asking about using them for large scale sites.

I've been doing a lot of research, and it seems to me that using PHP as a templating engine itself and creating my own DB class using native DB calls (going to use MySQL until I find it no longer suites my needs) would be the most efficient approach. 

I do plan on separating Data/Business/Presentation logic to make maintenance easier, so that's the only reason I'm considering using a Template engine to separate the Business/Presentation layers, and then either PDO, ADOdb or PEAR::DB for the data layer.

But once again, I've come to the conclusion that using pure PHP to separate the Business/Presentation layers, while using my own home brewed DB class as the data layer would be the best way to go regarding performance/scalability.

Are there professionals out there with experience working on large scale sites/applications that can lend their two cents?

Thanks, Jesse Burns
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