new development: PHP or Perl: perl, php

by: php-webdesignPosted on 2004-10-11 at 00:38:32ID: 12274391

Well... i think both languages have their advantages and disadvantages. About the 1000 users using it simaltaniously, the preformance of you application will still be dependent on the way YOU will write your application.

If you really want to be sure read the following article:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/phpvscgi.shtml

by: php-webdesignPosted on 2004-10-11 at 00:40:03ID: 12274395

and:

http://php.weblogs.com/php_versus_perl
http://perl.about.com/library/weekly/aa040500a.htm

[quote]
The biggest advantage of PHP over Perl is that PHP was designed for scripting for the web where Perl was designed to do a lot more and can because of this get very complicated. The flexibility / complexity of Perl makes it easier to write code that another author / coder has a hard time reading. PHP has a less confusing and stricter format without losing flexibility. PHP is easier to integrate into existing HTML than Perl. PHP has pretty much all the 'good' functionality of Perl: constructs, syntax and so on, without making it as complicated as Perl can be. Perl is a very tried and true language, it's been around since the late eighties, but PHP is maturing very quickly.
[/quote]

by: pmosinskisPosted on 2004-10-11 at 12:15:06ID: 12279827

PHP for sure. Integrates with the web environment more easily.
Also tops in terms of performance.

--pete

by: Ivanov_GPosted on 2004-10-13 at 01:48:28ID: 12295872

I made some test 5 time executing 10 mln loops:

PHP : for ($i=0; $i<10000000; $i++)
{
$a = 1;
}

Perl : for (my $i=0; $i<10000000; $i++)
{
my $a = 1;
}

Perl
3.914818 s
3.574317 s
3.604372 s
3.754552 s
3.584347 s

Php
5.13295507431 s
5.14524912834 s
5.19279384613 s
5.30360507965 s
5.20312786102 s

It seems that Perl is faster...

by: arantiusPosted on 2004-10-14 at 17:10:30ID: 12314081

That's a relatively poor test, it concentrates on one tiny thing (assigning value to a variable). You were also probably running scripts (at least perl) from the command line rather than web server environment.

I would say PHP hands down. Technically Perl can be a bit faster, but coding technique has significantly more impact than programming language. Development time, though, will be significantly lower with PHP, as it is designed for the task. PHP does web pages, and well.

If performance is an issue, there are free and commercial optimizers that claim (and show benchmarks) for 10 or more times speed increase.

by: Ivanov_GPosted on 2004-10-17 at 06:44:45ID: 12332221

I ran the tests from a web page... It shows that PHP is slower ... I don't know why. The top issue here is the performance...

by: Adesso21Posted on 2004-10-19 at 03:03:48ID: 12345717

PHP might be a bit slower.. but may a suggest something that you should rather be looking at.. MySQL instead of PostgreSQL

In due time you will have a rather large DB structure and if you choose rigth now.. that will not become a problem later..

If you want to have a test .. try this .. PHP script and see if you can make your server crash..

Just make a DB with one table MDtable that has an Auto incrament ID and a varchar(255) field

Then see if you can do the same in perl.. in essance this is the diffrence between PHP and Perl.. PHP is much faster to develop and easyer to understand..

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Nail the server</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<style>
      DIV {
            border : 1px solid black;
            width : 800px;
      }

</style>
</head>
<body>
Attempting to crash the server with too many records.. <br>

<?
set_time_limit(8000000000);
function open_db() {
$db = "nail";
            $dbuser = "{username}";
           $dbpass = "{pass}";
            $dbhost = "{host}";
      if (!isset($link)) {
            $_SESSION['link'] = mysql_connect ($dbhost,$dbuser,$dbpass) or die ("Error: Could not connect.");
            mysql_select_db ($db) or die (print_r($_SESSION)."Error: Could not select database: $db, $dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass");
      }
}

function close_db() {
      if (isset($link)) {
            mysql_close($link);
      }
}

function timenow() {
      $today = getdate();
      $hours = $today['hours'];
      $minutes = $today['minutes'];
      $seconds = $today['seconds'];

      $newtime = $hours.":".$minutes.":".$seconds;
      return $newtime;
}
?>
<div>
<?
$startTime = timenow();
for($i=0; $i < 1000000; $i++) {
      print "+ \n";
      for($j=0; $j < 1000000; $j++) {
            $MDstr = md5(timenow());
            open_db();
                  $Qinsert = "INSERT INTO MDtable VALUES(NULL,'$MDstr');";
                  mysql_query ($Qinsert) or die("$Qinsert \n\n");
            close_db();
            print ". ";
      }
      print " ";
      flush;
}
?>
</div>
<?
$endTime = timenow();
print "<br><br><strong>started</strong> $startTime";
print "<br><br>Added <strong>".$i*$j."</strong> records";
print "<br><br><strong>ended</strong> $endTime";
?>
</body>
</html>

by: Ivanov_GPosted on 2004-10-19 at 03:42:34ID: 12345837

Adesso21, I agree that PHP will have less development time, but what I want is top performance. Since Perl seems faster, I will choose it...

About the DB - MySQL vs. PostgreSQL - there are a lot of articles on this issue. Postgres offer more functional SQL language with sequences, stored procedures, triggers, etc. The new versions of PostgreSQL are not so slow... In fact the performance is almost the same as MySQL transactional tables.

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new development: PHP or Perl

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