The Right Language

The Right Language

The first question a developer facing a performance issue should check is if they're using the right programming language. Perhaps the language interpreter causes most of the slow down, so there's little point in optimizing the code; it'll never be enough.

Several programming languages were benchmarked to check how fast they were compared to PHP. The benchmarks involved a lot of different types of scripts using different operations; the results are an average of all the tests.

The tests were done on:

• CGI Perl scripts
  The traditional way to code web sites and applications just one or two years ago

• FastCGI Perl scripts
  A mechanism to improve the performance problems of CGI scripts

• Python CGI scripts
  In this case we used Python to code CGI scripts

• mod_python Python scripts
  An Apache module to let Apache run Python code without calling the Python interpreter

• C CGI scripts
  Compiled C scripts running as CGI programs

• mod_perl Perl scripts
  An Apache module to let Apache run Perl scripts without having to execute the Perl interpreter

• PHP
  To compare the other languages to PHP, the same test were run on PHP

After several benchmarks, including different script types and server loads, it was found that mod_perl, FastCGi, and PHP were the fastest options with very similar results. Therefore, if a PHP site or script is facing a performance problem then the solution is to work with the code and not change the language.