Bill de hÓra

Hmm, I can't really think of what is instrinsic about Java that is "not designed with multi-user environements in mind". Is is the servlet container of which you are thinking, or the JVM? Perhaps you should elaborate ...

David, it's a question of monitoring the application. With Java, you've got one big fat process. You can't monitor finely its real memory usage with standard tools, you can't fine grain the authorizations on execution level, you can't see right away the bottlenecks in the processes, managing hot-redeploy on a multiuser level is a pain, when the JVM crashes everybody lays on the floor, and so on.

Whereas in a LAMP install with suexec, every time a page a called, a process is forked, inheriting it's owner and group from the OS, and you're in an almost perfect POSIX running condition: process isolation, a real filesystem, monitoring through standard tools, if the process crashes: no problem for the others... it's like Heaven on Earth compared to all the work required to gain the same level of robustness with Java.

Actually, PHP doesn't use suexec like that at all. It shares its address space with apache (there is usually more than apache process though, thanks to its prefork model).

This is assuming you're using mod_php instead of php.cgi, but most people use mod_php.