3 ms·

Web server performance shoot out - simple pages

2 points by iamelgringo 19y ago

shogunmike 19y ago
This is a good test, and the results are quite interesting. I'm surprised at just how much Apache + PHP beat out RoR. However, as the disclaimer in the post says, "it's not a real world test". I wonder why connecting to a database wasn't included? It confused me initially because the acronym on the graph is "LAMP" - should it not be "LAP"? :)
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Why would that surprise you? RoR is stunningly slow and PHP is pretty damned fast (in general--though I've seen a lot of pathologically bad PHP code in the wild that sucked for performance, usually due to database abuse...of course, I've also seen RoR apps that are even slower due to database abuse). Luckily, most applications built in RoR (or PHP, or Catalyst, or Django, etc.) never have to scale out very much, and by the time they do, the revenue is hopefully there to help fix the problem by brute force.
  - shogunmike 19y ago
    Hehe...perhaps it didn't really surprise me so much, maybe I was just hoping for it to be a bit better! I really don't like code that "hacks together" a solution and then requires a substantial remedy later (who does?!) so I'm quite interested in getting it right from the beginning. Assuming that many of us here develop web applications, and that some are going to need to scale heavily, what do you recommend as a good solution? I have yet to read either of these two books, but they are on my list (I only have one at home, the other I'll order): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderson/dp/0596102356/ref=pd_sim_b?ie=UTF8&qid=1197382004&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderso... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Techniques-Administrators/dp/0596003064/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197382004&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Technique... Both are O'Reilly so I'm assuming they'll be good! Let me know if you have any other resources for this, because I imagine it's a very common issue for successful startups.
    - aston 19y ago
      "High Performance MySQL [and other oxymorons]" Not a bad book, though, for letting you know about all of the random features MySQL has. It's hard to get the same information in one place otherwise.
SwellJoe 19y ago
This is kind of a pointless exercise. Nobody on this site is using RoR (or whatever) to build a few mildly dynamic pages. Even if you were to compare an identical application built in each language/framework, you'd still be testing just that application. And no one should be surprised that RoR is "slow" in comparison to these other options. By the time you slap a framework on any of the others, you'll find they're an order of magnitude slower--maybe not as slow as RoR, since the Ruby interpreter is pretty slow, but still much more comparable. In fact, CakePHP is known to be pretty comparable to RoR performance-wise. Likewise for Catalyst, and the Perl interpreter is significantly faster than the Ruby interpreter.

2 points by iamelgringo 19y ago

This is a good test, and the results are quite interesting. I'm surprised at just how much Apache + PHP beat out RoR. However, as the disclaimer in the post says, "it's not a real world test". I wonder why connecting to a database wasn't included? It confused me initially because the acronym on the graph is "LAMP" - should it not be "LAP"? :)

SwellJoe 19y ago
Why would that surprise you? RoR is stunningly slow and PHP is pretty damned fast (in general--though I've seen a lot of pathologically bad PHP code in the wild that sucked for performance, usually due to database abuse...of course, I've also seen RoR apps that are even slower due to database abuse). Luckily, most applications built in RoR (or PHP, or Catalyst, or Django, etc.) never have to scale out very much, and by the time they do, the revenue is hopefully there to help fix the problem by brute force.
- shogunmike 19y ago
  Hehe...perhaps it didn't really surprise me so much, maybe I was just hoping for it to be a bit better! I really don't like code that "hacks together" a solution and then requires a substantial remedy later (who does?!) so I'm quite interested in getting it right from the beginning. Assuming that many of us here develop web applications, and that some are going to need to scale heavily, what do you recommend as a good solution? I have yet to read either of these two books, but they are on my list (I only have one at home, the other I'll order): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderson/dp/0596102356/ref=pd_sim_b?ie=UTF8&qid=1197382004&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderso... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Techniques-Administrators/dp/0596003064/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197382004&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Technique... Both are O'Reilly so I'm assuming they'll be good! Let me know if you have any other resources for this, because I imagine it's a very common issue for successful startups.
  - aston 19y ago
    "High Performance MySQL [and other oxymorons]" Not a bad book, though, for letting you know about all of the random features MySQL has. It's hard to get the same information in one place otherwise.

SwellJoe 19y ago

This is kind of a pointless exercise. Nobody on this site is using RoR (or whatever) to build a few mildly dynamic pages. Even if you were to compare an identical application built in each language/framework, you'd still be testing just that application. And no one should be surprised that RoR is "slow" in comparison to these other options. By the time you slap a framework on any of the others, you'll find they're an order of magnitude slower--maybe not as slow as RoR, since the Ruby interpreter is pretty slow, but still much more comparable. In fact, CakePHP is known to be pretty comparable to RoR performance-wise. Likewise for Catalyst, and the Perl interpreter is significantly faster than the Ruby interpreter.