I am on a LAMP stack for a website I am managing. There is a need to roll up usage statistics (a variety of things related to our desktop product), and I initially tackled the problem with PHP (being that I had a bunch of classes to work with the data already). All worked well on my dev box which was using 5.3

Long story short, 5.1 memory management seems to suck a lot worse, and I've had to do a lot of fooling to get the long term roll up scripts to run in a fixed memory space. Our server guys are unwilling to upgrade php at this time. I've since moved my dev server back to 5.1 so I don't run into this problem again...

For mining of mysql databases to roll up statistics for different periods and resolutions, potentially running a process that does this all the time in the future (as opposed to on a cron schedule), what language choice do you recommend? I was looking at python (I know it more or less), java (don't know it that well), sticking it out with php (know it quite well).

Thanks for any suggestions.

Josh