In my experience: PHP is always blazing fast, with no additional setup to make "Reload page, see results" work. Python needs additional setup. Either by monit

In my experience: PHP is always blazing fast, with no additional setup to make "Reload page, see results" work. Python needs additional setup. Either by monitoring the filesystem and pessimistically recompiling the application every time a file changes. Causing resource consumption every time you hit save in your editor. Or by having the web workers that serve the requests die after 1s of inactivity or so. Which makes the next pageview slow again, even if no code changed. I think PHP's advantage is because of 3 things: 1: Recompiling changed files is built in. 2: With PHP you can set your project up in a way that only the code necessary to answer a single request is updated. With Python and Django, all the code for all requests is updated and even code paths that are actually never used. 3: PHP keeps each file compiled to bytecode in memory and only recompiles files that have been changed. Although you might accomplish something similar in Python if you let it pollute your filesystem with cached bytecode files.