Is PHP suitable for very large projects? Can it be transaction-safe?
<p>That question may appear strange.</p>

<p>But every time I made PHP projects in the past, I encountered this sort of bad experience:</p>

<p>Scripts cancel running after 10 seconds. This results in very bad database inconsistencies (bad example for an deleting loop: User is about to delete an photo album. Album object gets deleted from database, and then half way down of deleting the photos the script gets killed right where it is, and 10.000 photos are left with no reference). </p>

<p>It's not transaction-safe. I've never found a way to do something <em>securely</em>, to ensure it's <em>done</em>. If script gets killed, it gets killed. Right in the middle of a loop. It gets just killed. That never happened on tomcat with java. Java runs and runs and runs, if it takes long.</p>

<p>Lot's of newsletter-scripts try to come around that problem by splitting the job up into a lot of packages, i.e. sending 100 at a time, then relading the page (oh man, really stupid), doing the next one, and so on. Most often something hangs or script will take longer than 10 seconds, and your platform is crippled up.</p>

<p>But then, I hear that very big projects use PHP like studivz (the german facebook clone, actually the biggest german website). So there is a tiny light of hope that this bad behavior just comes from unprofessional hosting companies who just kill php scripts because their servers are so bad. What's the truth about this? Can it be configured in such a way, that scripts never get killed because they take a little longer?</p>
