On the SitePoint PHP Blog today, Harry Fuecks takes a look at why PHP from a sysadmin's perspective.

A funny from the Python crowd: phpfilter—PHP "support" under CherryPy. There is a serious side to that though—it's spitting out something that looks like a PHP parse error—i.e. this is a developer problem (e.g. someone ftp’d a PHP straight onto their live web server for “testing”), not a runtime error.

More to the point, when was the last time you saw a PHP runtime error take down an entire application or web server? And no - "MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server" doesn’t count—PHP and the web server are still running—the MySQL server (or otherwise) is to blame.

He also looks at a slightly different method for serving up web applications - with FastCGI. He talks about the basic features of a server (forking, threading, asynchronous I/O) and how that explains how we've ended up with PHP being the "lesser of the evils"...