I need to make a simple site that allows people to make
submissions into a DB, and
also allows people to call the page and have it bring up
simple user details from a DB.
This site is going to potentially have high volume periods.
So speed is very important to me.
(the site is not complex, I do not need additional management layers like apache sturts etc, its only the performance during high volume that is important)

I know both JSP and PHP can do this job.
I am very new to PHP

Does anyone know if one technology is by far the superior choice for my scenario?

I suppose using JSP would need the JVM and tomcat, is that going to have a huge impact on performance?

Does PHP get recompiled every request (or can it be made not to)?

Is the method PHP uses to connect to the DB faster than the JDBC connection method used in java?

Would postegres a better choice for the database as opposed to say MySQL?

If anyone has any feedback it'd be much appreciated.

Well, I would use JSP, tomcat and postgres, but mostly for personal reasons.

Why JSP? I don't really like the syntax of PHP (for example the unability to arbitrarily operate with return values of functions without temporal variables makes me mad (and code messy)). But still, PHP could succeed from the same tasks as well as JSP.

Why postgres? I don't really like MySql. I have problems with the access model and the subset of SQL it supports.

Why tomcat? Well, it is somewhat nightmare to configure, but I haven't found anything nicer yet.

What comes to JDBC, I don't think it comes to a performance issue. If you keep persistent connections then there is no initialization overhead.

Please give us some tips on installing and configuring Tomcat.
Also what is the difference in the versions? v.5.x.x has more components than previous versions.

I have installed MySql, the reason is it's compact, well used / documented and something I haven't used.
Java Standard Edition (JSE) - again, well documented and well used. Further than that I know very little about java and working in the dark.
At the mo I'm busy with the connector/J and connecting java to mysql.

Something else. Check out Oracle, 9iAS with Java...
It is after all the fastest db


Cheers