4 ms·

Not only that—it used to perform really well. For years, a repeated (if, sadly, uncommon) experience for me has been: "Holy shit, this web site/app is fast!"

• knodi123 5y ago
  Yeah, I remember I used to work at a perl webshop, and I was experimenting with PHP.... I actually lost a half hour or so trying to figure out how to get my site to refresh and rerender, and it turned out it was! But it was so much faster than Perl that I assumed nothing was happening. Hey, I was young, don't be too hard on me!
  • handrous 5y ago
    There's a web framework performance comparison project out there that makes HN from time to time, and IIRC the findings have been you basically can't reliably beat PHP performance at serving dynamic web sites without resorting to a compiled language—and even then, it's far from guaranteed. I haven't written much PHP in a long time, but I'd believe it. There are some really slow programs in PHP (Wordpress...) but the language is damn fast. Its tendency to be only a thin wrapper over C or C++, such that one rarely spends much time in PHP itself, is probably the main reason.
    • knodi123 5y ago
      I'd absolutely believe that. A bigger contributing factor was that our Perl site was launching a process that parsed some libraries and then served HTML. While the php site was using a server extension that kept a parent process running and just spawned a thread for page requests. Again, don't judge me - I was very, very young. :-)
• johnebgd 5y ago
  I remember those days. Before framework were popular for PHP sites and SQL injection was not just possible but expected for anything that ended in .PHP or .php3 …