mass customization web app - performance issue

I wanted to create something like zazzle.com or puma.jp/tribes (see this SO post for reference). Having a mass customization app can be causing heavy traffic and can be a memory eater. Especially if you are performing AJAX calls every few seconds. does it really matter, what programming language I choose? Flash 开发者_Go百科and XML (and DB behind) or JQUERY and PHP (and DB behind)?

Is there some web app performance (by type) comparison tool out there?

thanks a lot again

Steilflug

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The client side platform chosen doesn't really matter for overall performance - Flash performance can be pretty bad, but that's all on the client side so doesn't affect the number of users your server can support. A flash only site is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but server performance isn't one of them.

On the server side you will need a database and PHP or equivalent whatever you do - something has to generate the XML. The various platforms available do have different performance characteristics, but the dominant factor in performance is generally the structure of your database and the queries you run on it, which is platform independent.