
Web server performance shoot out - simple pages - iamelgringo
http://blog.davber.com/2007/12/10/web-server-performance-shoot-out-simple-pages/
======
SwellJoe
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.

------
shogunmike
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
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
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-Henderso...](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/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-
Technique...](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)

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
_"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.

