A grandiose powerpoint presentation that anybody that works with PHP, MySQL and Apache on Linux should see Nils Lngner, known by many from the legendary PHP-Blog PHP hates me (but that's ok), has explained in detail in 20122 how you can serve up 16B requests on stern.de for breakst, and all that without touching the code.
The presentation is a solid example for excellent workflow optimization: Nils started out with a (theoretical) 'money is no object' strategy (which still used about 6,000 servers!), and optimized step-by-step, until in the end only 4 (!) servers were required. Again, without touching the code. Just the first step, in which static content and dynamic content were separated, reduced the servers down to about 60, so down to about 1% (!!) from before the optimization. Added to that comes an extreme reduction of the rendering times (from 6 seconds down to < 1 sec), potential front-end improvements are still not used (about that some more in a bit).
These are numbers that inspire some serious thought, and also the answer to the question of whether having Dev-Ops in your company is useful: Yes.
A very good example for what the amateur PHP/MySQL/Apache-stack itself can do in the high end-segment of performance.
Is there more?
From the current perspective (the presentation is now 2 1/2 years old) it is really interesting when one compares the performance jumps of the recent PHP versions (php 5.7 is up to 30% faster than PHP 5.5, which was much faster than php 5.3), and when you compile the whole workd using HipHop or when you start using optimized nginx. Front-end wise there are a lot of possibilities nowadays, binary image files can be compressed extremely without much visual loss (take the first .png you have on your desktop and ship it to tinypng.com, and that's only for starters!), Icons can be sent as zipped paths or sprites, and a shipping an (almost) empty body and then to use javascript to populate the page is also relatively normal. This can save 50-90% of traffic and requests, and associated CDN costs.
In short, the 'beginners stack' with PHP, MySQL and Apache definitely has the tools to deliver high-end websites. When you do it right. But then again, since Facebook and Wikipedia we already knew that.
