Comment Re:10:1... Really? (Score 2, Informative) 752
PHP's primary issue in the database department is it doesn't have a clean way of say, maintaining prepared statement declarations across connection instances. Which is frustrating. APC's handling of shared memory is not the best, either, and the memcached extensions for it need polish. Don't get me started on how PHP treats constants.
Where PHP really fails, however, is in memory usage. It takes up dozens of times as much RAM as a well-built C program would. Facebook would not reduce their computer count by a factor of ten because PHP is that much less efficient at its job, but because more memory would be available in a given machine to handle more instances at once.
Note: PHP 5.3 addresses a lot of this, but though I haven't tested it, I doubt the memory efficiency of PHP is going to get far into the double-digit percentiles of C++ in one shot.