Curia

[A lot of the information below is out of date. Please see the new framework shootout page for the latest benchmarks.]

Recently I went on a benchmarking spree and decided to throw ApacheBench at a bunch of the different web development technology platforms I interact with on a day-to-day basis. The results were interesting enough to me that I decided I’d take a post to share them here.

Disclaimer: The following test results should be taken with a massive grain of salt. If you know anything about benchmarking, you will know that the slightest adjustments have the potential to change things drastically. While I have tried to perform each test as fairly and accurately as possible, it would be foolish to consider these results as scientific in any way. It should also be noted that my goal here was not to see how fast each technology performs at its most optimized configuration, but rather what a minimal out-of-the-box experience looks like.

Test platform info:

• The hardware was an Intel Core2Quad Q9300, 2.5Ghz, 6MB Cache, 1333FSB, 2GB DDR RAM.
• The OS was CentOS v5.3 32-bit with a standard Apache Webserver setup.
• ApacheBench was used with only the -n and -c flags (1000 requests for the PHP frameworks, 5000 requests for everything else).
• Each ApacheBench test was run 5-10 times, with the “optimum average” chosen as the numbers represented here.
• The PHP tests were done using the standard Apache PHP module.
• The mod_wsgi tests were done in daemon mode set to 2 processes/15 threads.
• The SQL tests were done with mysqli ($mysql->query()) on PHP, and SQLAlchemy (conn.execute()) on Python fetching and printing 5 rows of data from a sample database.

Apache v2.2.3

We will start with the raw Apache benchmark.

For this test, Apache loaded a simple HTML file with random text:

Document LENGTH:        6537 bytes
Requests per second:    8356.23 [#/sec] (mean)

As expected, Apache is lightning fast.

Ok, so now that we’ve set the high water mark, let’s take a look at some popular web technology platforms… (continue reading…)

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned falling in love with Python. Now that I’m finally using Python for a large percentage of my development and am more than “casually acquainted” with its toolset, I thought it would be fun to highlight a few reasons why Python has become my new language of choice.

In an effort to help you understand where I’m coming from, let me (briefly) rehash some of my programming history: I spent much of the 90′s doing dynamic web development using Perl (weren’t those the days!). I eventually migrated to PHP which usually made things much easier on the web; and subsequently replaced most of my console scripting with BASH [shell scripting]. However, I’m kind of a hack and love languages so I have occasionally been known to write something in C; and although I’m not a complete stranger to Java and Ruby, I never really felt like I “clicked” with either of those languages.

Ok, now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that I’m not just a fly-by-night programmer, let me show you some Python code. Brace yourself, as this article is bound to get lengthy… (continue reading…)

There’s been a lot of noise in the development community over the last year or so about DVCS. Being highly opinionated myself, I can’t help but take a minute to share my own thoughts on the matter.

Let me start by first of all saying: Yes, it’s true. Distributed Version Control Systems really are everything that Centralized Version Control Systems (read: SVN/CVS) fall short on. However, having been a long-time Subversion user myself, as well as the fact that I hardly ever work on a team with more than a couple of other developers, it took a lot of noise to make me even care about the differences between DVCS and CVCS. So what is the difference you might ask? Almost everything; and that’s a good thing! (ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the benefits are so profound it almost feels that way)

Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the repetition of what has already been said elsewhere. My story is this: I spent about a month looking at the various DVCS’ and eventually narrowed it down to Git vs Mercurial (why anyone would use Bazaar over Mercurial is beyond me). Since I’m a Linux user, and since Github impressed me, I finally decided to go with Git on the next project that came my way. Boy oh boy do I wish I had run across this article beforehand… (continue reading…)