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How fast is PHP?

Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 11:18 am
by Ironwil
How fast does PHP process and render pages when compared to other web development technologies like ASP.NET? I looked online for any benchmark information, but didn't find much. Since my current hosting plan has IIS, that is the environment I'm most interested in, but the speed when using Apache is also helpful.

Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 12:43 pm
by Jonah Bron

Re: How fast is PHP?

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 3:49 am
by josh
Too many factors to answer definitely.

A "webpage" might require a complex framework to do what it does. It might use a cache, etc.. so comparing full applications is not fair without lots of background detail on the apps being compared to make sure its apples and apples.

Then if you just benchmark basic code thats not fair either. Websites are complex, and often require frameworks. Doing 1 thing might require 10x as much code in PHP, doing another thing might require 10x as much ASP code... so again its just impossible to get apples and apples.

For the cost of 1 month's of a programmer's salary you can just get a really fast server though and then it doesnt matter. And you can do caching in any language too which makes the whole argument of performance moot. Even if a language were painfully slow it is generally going to excel in some other area, so it all comes down to personal preference/need. Ex Assembler is very fast, but does not excel at being very abstract.

Re: How fast is PHP?

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 8:12 am
by Weirdan
josh wrote:For the cost of 1 month's of a programmer's salary you can just get a really fast server though and then it doesnt matter.
On a larger scale it does matter though. When your site joins 'highload club' investing into programmers suddenly starts to be much more cost-effective.