At Expensify, everything we do is a balance. As a startup, we can’t build every feature we and our users want, or install as many servers as we can imagine. Sometimes though, we see a change we can make that won’t cost much (in time or money) and will benefit for our users. Here’s the story of one of those times that didn’t work out as well as we hoped.
Most of our website is written in PHP. While there is some healthy debate among our engineering staff, most of us like PHP for its rapid development and ease of deployment. Our web servers use the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) to cache compiled code and speed up requests for our users. A few months ago we updated our web server configuration to use less memory for each PHP process. Continue Reading…
