"Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'"

"Next was comparing Merb against other ruby options. Returning directly from the Merb router kills everything, but there aren’t many scenarios you could use that. Sinatra is just slightly faster than returning from the Merb controller, which both outperform Rails by a 3-4x. Rails itself still kills CakePHP."

markbao2• 18 years ago

oh, crap.

charlesju• 18 years ago

Maybe I'm slow but it seems to me that the language is never the bottleneck for web applications. It seems to me that the bottleneck is in the db which is language agnostic for all general purposes.

And anything that is slow with just Ruby can be solved by throwing money at it.

jamongkad• 18 years ago

True I think another bottleneck would be the web server serving the pages. Albeit a distant one as compared to the DB. What I don't get here is what is everyone's obsession with speed and shootout contests. What gives? I think we as developers have to focus on the bigger picture.

To build apps that our users will love.

No matter the language, framework, or whatever. If we miss this point which is a very crucial point for that matter. Then all of our optimizations are for nothing.

jlouis2• 18 years ago

Thoughtful and correct IMO. Caching is much more important to get right than backend-speed. Number crunching capability does not matter that much for web applications. And you can always outsource the tough calculations to languages better suited for it: ML, Common Lisp, C++, C, etc.

rlachenal• 18 years ago

Translate please -

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...

silentbicycle4• 18 years ago

The white bars are time, the black bars are memory usage. Ergo, in most cases, PHP is running 2-5x faster than Ruby, but using about 3x as much memory.

jlouis2• 18 years ago

Memory usage can probably be attributed to how PHP manages memory (hint: It /almost/ doesn't).

igouy7• 18 years ago

> in most cases

In 9/15 cases PHP is >= 2x faster In 6/15 cases PHP uses less memory

igouy7• 18 years ago

What don't you understand?

igouy7• 18 years ago

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/faq.php#mirrorcharts

jacobbijani• 18 years ago

Oh, god. How many times does this point need to be made? Yeah, cool. The compiler is fast.

Probably 1% of all websites on the internet ever manage to get enough traffic to make the language matter, right?

kaens2• 18 years ago

To be frank, at this point in time when I'm developing for the web, just about the only thing I care about when it comes to what language I'm using is that it's not PHP.

I understand why people use PHP, but as someone who has a decent amount of experience with a variety of languages, I really want a language that's designed sanely, especially for things like web-(sites|apps). I'll gladly take a hit on the language-speed side, or on the ease-of-finding-hosting side for the sake of not having to put up with PHPs craziness.

Why? For just the reason you pointed out - the vast majority of websites don't get enough traffic to make the language matter. I'd imagine that things like learning how to configure apache and/or a caching tool like memcached would handle most of the performance bottleneck on a site that did get that level of traffic.

Seriously - if a language is "fast" enough to allow the creation of responsive GUI apps, it's "fast" enough for web-apps.

neovive• 18 years ago

PHP might not be the most elegant in the world, but for a small- to mid-size web application, using a solid PHP5 framework (like KohanaPHP) along with a PHP accelerator and you have an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy application.

sfamiliar• 18 years ago

quite a few newcomers come to rails and think it's slow, because they're 'doin it wrong'. every framework's speed is really about your deployment setup. running mongrel can be slow, especially if you're load-testing a single mongrel instance. multiple instances can be slow if they're connecting to a slow database and serving static files.

put nginx in front of thin, start caching frequently used objects, and slice up your database and suddenly speed isn't a problem. php has the (perceived) advantage of running compiled in an apache module, typically. but it's a perception -- you have to do a little more tuning with your rails deployment to make it scream, but make no mistake, it can scream, even under heavy load, and without a huge server farm, at least up to 500K pages/day. i know that number because i've served it. quickly.

in radiant. (gasp! yes, with some caching.)

with one database.

it's a lesson i learned working with tomcat back in the day: defaults suck. learn your framework, learn your app server, pick the Right Thing. it's all about application tuning and app-server choice, and that goes for every language and platform in existence.

zinxq• 18 years ago

If you're comparing something to PHP's speed, you've already lost.

drawkbox• 18 years ago

...and Python is still 3x faster than PHP and Ruby without psyco..

"Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'"

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