4 ms·

The single sentence that surprised me the most: "For performance, there is no question that Haskell will win hands down on any performance comparison".

tikhonj 15y ago
Why is that surprising? Haskell is a compiled language with a very clever optimizing compiler, so it tends to be pretty fast by any standard. On top of this, it has recently had some improvements to its IO manager which is particularly important for web servers. Ruby, on the other hand, is notoriously slow.
- zoul 15y ago
  Performance isn’t measured just by the language tools, it depends on the whole stack. It’s quite probable that the Ruby/Rails stack is better suited to high-performance sites simply because it has more installations and the kinks have been worked out.
  - lincolnq 15y ago
    I agree that the priors would suggest that you are correct, however, let me give some evidence to update you: The Warp web server for Haskell is the fastest Web application server that exists. http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Warp_a_Haskell_Web_Server.pdf http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Warp_a_Haskell_Web_Server.pd... [pdf, but easy to read] -- in the comparison on page 2, php handled 3400 requests per second, and Warp 81000.
    - yxhuvud 15y ago
      Uh. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. As to why, here is a hint: The three most common webservers in the world are Apache, nginx and IIS. Yet are any of those even mentioned in that paper? NO.
      - lincolnq 15y ago
        Hm, you may be right. The methodology to arrive at these results in the paper is not given at all (as far as I can tell). However I suspect that the three you listed would not be benchmarked on their own, as they are not application servers, just frontends. It would be more reasonable to benchmark Apache+mod_wsgi or whatever, and it would be nice to see that on the graph.
getsat 15y ago
Ruby is as slow as PHP (see: Debian Language Shootout), and Rails is even worse because you're operating at a ridiculous stack depth. MRI and YARV are horrible at doing GC on deep stacks.

tikhonj 15y ago

Why is that surprising? Haskell is a compiled language with a very clever optimizing compiler, so it tends to be pretty fast by any standard. On top of this, it has recently had some improvements to its IO manager which is particularly important for web servers. Ruby, on the other hand, is notoriously slow.

zoul 15y ago
Performance isn’t measured just by the language tools, it depends on the whole stack. It’s quite probable that the Ruby/Rails stack is better suited to high-performance sites simply because it has more installations and the kinks have been worked out.
- lincolnq 15y ago
  I agree that the priors would suggest that you are correct, however, let me give some evidence to update you: The Warp web server for Haskell is the fastest Web application server that exists. http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Warp_a_Haskell_Web_Server.pdf http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Warp_a_Haskell_Web_Server.pd... [pdf, but easy to read] -- in the comparison on page 2, php handled 3400 requests per second, and Warp 81000.
  - yxhuvud 15y ago
    Uh. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. As to why, here is a hint: The three most common webservers in the world are Apache, nginx and IIS. Yet are any of those even mentioned in that paper? NO.
    - lincolnq 15y ago
      Hm, you may be right. The methodology to arrive at these results in the paper is not given at all (as far as I can tell). However I suspect that the three you listed would not be benchmarked on their own, as they are not application servers, just frontends. It would be more reasonable to benchmark Apache+mod_wsgi or whatever, and it would be nice to see that on the graph.

getsat 15y ago

Ruby is as slow as PHP (see: Debian Language Shootout), and Rails is even worse because you're operating at a ridiculous stack depth. MRI and YARV are horrible at doing GC on deep stacks.