Interpreted vs. Compiled Languages for Web Sites (PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, etc.)

Question

I build database-driven web sites. Previously I have used Perl or PHP with MySQL.

Now I am starting a big new project, and I want to do it in the way that will result in

Answer 1

What you can do is what multiple heavy-traffic websites do (like Facebook or Twitter), aka write your "CPU consuming" algorythm in a C-plugin.

For example, you could write a PHP extension if you plan to use PHP, or a Ruby extension if you plan to use Ruby / Ruby on Rails, etc.

That way, you can keep your streamline code simple and easy to maintain (it might be way harder to handle request from C rather than from PHP), while having a strong and solid background core (because it's compiled, and the compiler tells you what the issues are at compile time)