Benchmarking

gyoung

Can anyone point me in the direction of any benchmarking figures for PHP (eg versus ASP)?

I seen plenty of anecdotal evidence that PHP is fast, but little by way of hard "facts".

Many thanks

[deleted]

That's because how fast ASP or PHP is depends 100% on what you do with it, and what kind of servers you use and how well your script is written.

It is not possible to say that PHP is 25% faster than ASP, because I can think of 47 examples where ASP is faster than PHP (and 965 examples where PHP is faster than ASP)

One definate, undeniable fact about PHP is that it is much easier to learn, uses fewer resources and is a lot more stable than ASP.

brandonschnell

how fast do you need? in most cases the web scripting language will far outpace the available network bandwidth and the database.

to scale, add apache web servers running as reverse proxies front side. have those going to the apache/php web servers. use one master database and add replicated databases as needed.

personally, i just get tired of asp lack of functions. its annony that anything really cool with asp really wants to be compiled into a COM object then created from the asp page.

http://php.weblogs.com/php_asp_7_reasons
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/PHP-HOWTO-19.html

gyoung

I've seen the first link already, I'll check-out the other one.

I'm compling a report for my boss, comparing ASP/SQL Server to PHP/MySQL with a view to using PHP/MySQL in the future as a viable alternative to the Microsoft route

I appreciate that it is difficult to say if technology A is better than technology B but for a business report something more is required than "yeah it's fast enough, honest"!

I got some great stuff on MySQL on their site (www.mysql.com/benchmark.html) and was hoping to find something similar for PHP.

Thanks for your help!

[deleted]

Never ever trust any benchmark from the creators of the benchmarked product, because they will (understandibly) only test those parts that show that their product is faster.

MySQL for example insist that they are faster than postgres, which is only true for very simple queries on very small databases using very few concurrent users.
Hit MySQL over the head with 500 concurrent users accessing a multi-million row database running 50-line queries and it dies very quickly. And ofcourse they don't mention that PostgreSQL or Oracle has about 900% more functions that can save you weeks of development.

But more to the point, benchmarks seem usefull but tell you allmost nothing. Typicall business-report stuff, it looks great on paper but really means zip.
Unfortunately, the average manager makes decisions based on such reports and they are often not hindered by any IT knowledge themselves so they go for the product with the best-looking report.