Curia

[Note: This post is the continuation of a series. Please read Round 1 and Round 2 first if you are just now joining us.]

[Update 10/6: Slight updates to the Pylons test after some input from Ben. Added a couple new charts for you visual folks.]

As I briefly mentioned in Round 1, this whole thing came about as an experiment to satisfy my own curiosity. Unfortunately, I wasn’t expecting these posts to draw the amount of attention they have been getting, and several people informed me of a few “issues” with the first round. Since my initial approach to this topic was somewhat casual, I didn’t really take the time to perform each test in a “proper scientific fashion.” Although this was clearly stated in the introduction to round one, it unfortunately resulted in performance estimations that were somewhat less than accurate.

After input from various people much smarter than myself, I quickly went to work tweaking my test environment and building “proper” test apps. In the midst of this, a conversation about PHP accelerators prompted me to put PHP under the spotlight, which brought about Round 2 as an interim round. This gave me a chance to demonstrate the necessity of PHP acceleration, and only continued to solidify my opinion of PHP as an inferior web development language (remember, I just said my opinion).

Which brings us to Round 3. A lot of work has gone into “doing it right” this time, so I am fairly confident that these results are a much more accurate representation of each test subject’s performance estimations. Remember, benchmark test code typically has no real-world value, so “performance estimations” are about all I can promise here. Your mileage will vary. As a wise person once said:

“All this benchmarking is doing is proving what we already know: More code takes longer to execute.” – Ben Bangert (dev lead of Pylons)

(continue reading…)