Some people now boot an OS to serve each request, and reinstall the OS to deploy new changes. It's funny, even the objections to PHP haven't kept up with the trendy software practices.
I guess the objection to "spinning up a process" is actually a problem with slow PHP initialisation, though? A dinky server can spin up many thousands of processes a second. I'm pretty sure OS process overhead is nothing compared to whatever PHP or Rails or whatever else puts into your critical path, but the language/library/parsing requirements could kill you. (Though people still make this objection to CGI itself, not just PHP...)
The php "maybe process per request, if I'm being dumb, but probably not", vs AWS lambda "business as usual, here is a whole new os instance" is pretty amusing.
Lambda surely doesn't actually boot a new OS for every single request. I thought it stuck around for a set amount of time and you could even ping it to keep it warm?
I guess the objection to "spinning up a process" is actually a problem with slow PHP initialisation, though? A dinky server can spin up many thousands of processes a second. I'm pretty sure OS process overhead is nothing compared to whatever PHP or Rails or whatever else puts into your critical path, but the language/library/parsing requirements could kill you. (Though people still make this objection to CGI itself, not just PHP...)