There has been a usual public "I am better than you" debate over the fact that Friendster goes PHP.
Ian Kallen uses some common sense in his thoughts: The Scalability Holy Grail.
Obviously there is never a winner in "language X is better/faster/more scalable than language Y". It just doesn't make sense.
However, I do have direct knowledge on whether a Java site can run fast (some of the pro-PHP'ers claim it can't on that thread).
TheServerSide doesn't run fast, or slow, due to the fact that Java and a JVM are in the loop. What has allowed us to scale is the architecture. We don't use all of the most amazing design patterns, or the latest technology. We are using EJB and our own MVC layer (for now), yet it still runs well (although it is a pain to maintain like this).
Smart caching is king in our application (as Ian mentions in his blog). This is where Tangosol Coherence comes into play. Weilding that tool well has allowed our cluster to scale. It also allows us to get away with sloppy lower-level code, as in the grand scheme of things those nano-seconds don't matter!
We try hard not to be bottlenecked at the DB, and that is what gives us our performance AND scalability.
A PHP site designed to scale will be able to do this just as well. A site not designed in this manner will not be able to handle a large load.
Moving to PHP has worked for Friendster, but this probably means that they didn't grok how to write a Java web application that can scale (even with Java book authors ;) Fortunately they could write one in PHP, and good luck to them. There is room for all!
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