Does the way I website was built affect its capability to handle big amounts of load on its server?

Each technology has ways to manage big surges of load. What’s a bigger variable here is whether the person who coded the website did so in a way that takes advantage of the available technology.

As well, in my experience .NET is used for advanced web application design. Using .NET lets one code in a more traditional programming interface than one can get with PHP. This allows for not only more advanced applications, but advanced memory usage, both which might explain why a .NET app may take a bit longer to use.

Yes, different technologies will require different amounts of resources to perform properly. However how it’s served up can also play a significant role. Check in to different hosting options for your .NET application.

Example: you can serve Ruby on Rails apps a number of different ways (Passenger, Thin, Mongrel, fcgi, mod_ruby, etc) and each require different amounts of resources to meet a level of performance or might be suited for one type of app more than another.

This is what the buzzword “scaling” means. And yes, the way the website is built affects how it performs under load—but it is as much a question of how well the resources available within the environment are used as it is a question of how well different environments scale.

At a place I worked about 10 years ago, a developer wrote an application that fell down once it got more than about 25 requests a second. An experienced developer rewrote it so that it remained usable at 300 requests a second. That’s not something you can blame on the environment, since they were both written in the same environment.

.NET is a framework, PHP is a programming language. On the Zend Framework (a PHP Framework) mailinglist, the question of performance pops up every now and then. And yes, using ZF is less performant than plain PHP, but it comes with so much ease of programming that it’s a reasonable trade-off. Plus, the (quite likely) more structured programming might prevent you from doing insufficient things, because indeed, the programming of a website itself is one of the most important factors in performance.

@dynamicduo – .NET doesn’t allow for more advanced applications design than PHP, it just (like most frameworks do, also those for PHP) makes it easier to do.

I would be more inclined to believe that a particular implementation of the code in Python/PHP is faster than the code in .NET. After all, you’re not comparing apples to apples here. The way you code something can have huge impacts on scalability. I don’t think you can say that Python/PHP is faster than .NET, but you could say that it’s easier to write speed-optimized code for a particular application.

My two cents.