18. Performance benchmarking - PHP, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion

It is very important to bear in mind that performance and running speed of the web scripting engine must be given TOP PRIORITY. That is, how many pages per second the scripting engine can pump out to the browser clients. The greater the number of pages pumped out to clients in a given period of time, then the better and more powerful the scripting engine is.

The Zdnet did a evaluation and benchmarking of 4 web scripting languages. During benchmarking, the same spec and identical cpu, memory boxes were used. Under identical conditions, it was found that PHP was the fastest - about 3.7 times faster than JSP and about 1.2 times faster than ASP. Read the report at eWeek and mirror-site The benchmark results are -

• PHP pumped out about 47 pages/second
• Microsoft ASP pumped out about 43 pages/second
• Allaire ColdFusion pumped out about 29 pages/second
• Sun Java JSP pumped out about 13 pages/second

See also PHP, ASP benchmarks at http://aldev0.virtualave.net/php-perl-benchmarks.html

Whenever you design a web site, give attention to these important points:

• Speed of web scripting engine - how many pages per second it can pump out.
• KISS policy (Keep It Simple Stupid!!) - your web page should be very simple without any fancy graphics (because web users do not want to wait for long and they want the information very fast). And information they read is just plain text!!