Comments on: Speed test: PHP vs Perl vs Python vs Go vs C

By: Pedro Amaral Couto

Pedro Amaral Couto — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:53:09 +0000

time php -r "foreach(range(1000) as $i) { echo 'hello world'; }"
real 0m0.028s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.012s

time python -c "for i in range(1000): print 'hello'"
real 0m0.031s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m0.008s

time for i in {1..1000}; do python -c "print 'hello'"; done
real 0m21.730s
user 0m14.997s
sys 0m4.520s

time for i in {1..1000}; do php -r "echo 'hello'"; done
real 0m25.197s
user 0m13.913s
sys 0m9.309s

By: ProDragon33

ProDragon33 — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:10:26 +0000

Has anyone tried Speedy::CGI for perl ?

http://www.daemoninc.com/SpeedyCGI/

This is an amazing module for Web or command line perl script. It creates a persistent image of the post-interpreter (compiled?) code in the memory, i.e the interpreter runs only once. You can specify the timeout when this image can be destroyed if not accessed.

We have seen result improvements on repetitive run upto 1:10 on some heavy I/O + memory hogging scripts.

Most of already written scripts can run under Speedy, however some attention must be given to permanent and volatile variables data by using 'my' and 'our' for variable declaration to avoid ambiguous variable state on next invoking of the script

By: Jaime Castelltort

Jaime Castelltort — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:21:42 +0000

To what Scott said, I believe is part of a programming language to make OS calls, so, it is ok to me the performance test that was done to compare cronjobs execution time. My opinion, you use the language that fits the most to each specific task. For a web applicacion I would use PHP because the for web application PHP interpreter is compiled with Apache, which will help with the performance, for back end scripts and batch execution I would use perl… it all depends on what you like/know, what you need to accomplish and the environment(cli, gui, etc)

By: Kawaljeet Singh

Kawaljeet Singh — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:24:49 +0000

Sounds amazing hearing that PHP has taken 41.31 seconds. But the thing to be noted is we cannot do all tasks with C or Perl which can be ruled by PHP

By: hamish

hamish — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 21:06:01 +0000

No worries, Scott – who has time to read everything these days anyway? :)
I've put the disclaimer in bold now!

I'm going to include Ruby in the test too now…

By: scott

scott — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:49:34 +0000

I did end up skimming past some of those details. So, I would imagine the start-up and implementation of the interpreter would matter.
I do agree with your idea that perl would be the best for the job as you described it.

By: hamish

hamish — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:17:53 +0000

Scott, did you read my post? Or just skim read it? "Recently I have needed to run a cron job every minute on a high load web server" the speed test here includes starting up the interpreter. Because I am running a cron job every minute. This is not an overall performance test. This was a test to see which language was the fastest for this job. This was not an overall speed test. I was just trying to find out which approach would be fastest for running a cron job every minute. None of the programs tested run through a web server. They were all on the command line. This is not a web server speed test. This is not a general language speed test. This was a practical test to see which program would execute fastest for the purposes of a one minute cron job.

By: scott

scott — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:43:13 +0000

I do not mean this as a personal jab, but this is not a valid speed test. Many people are not aware that printing to the screen is an Operating System call, not a feature of the language. The reason for variation may have to with constraints; such as a web-server processing the data printed out by PHP.

A better speed test is held in categories such as: matrix multiplication, sorting, and mathematical computations like finding prime numbers.

Your speed test basically comes down to this:

do 1000 times
call OS write function with "Hello World" to standard out file
end
process file with OS/Server

By: hamish

hamish — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 21:11:47 +0000

You can separate structure and style in PHP too – if you want to. The thing about PHP is that you are free to do whatever you want. You can be OO – you can be procedural. You are FREE. If you dont like freedom then yes, choose a prison language like Python or Java or Perl or whatever ;)

Languages don't write bad code – people write bad code!

By: Datamunger

Datamunger — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 02:30:30 +0000

It seems that the new guidelines in Web 2.0 call for separating behavior from structure from style. With the re-emergence of Javascript(and jQuery), newer websites are not incorporating PHP into their HTML.

Perl seems to be a much cleaner, stricter, and more powerful language than PHP. And I have worked with both.