Re: Is Perl faster than PHP?

[Brent Baisley <brent@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since both Perl and PHP are scripting languages, I don't think you 
could definitively say one is faster than the other. First and foremost 
it's the talent of the coder that makes a program fast or slow. Perl 
has been around a lot longer and so the libraries (i.e. CPAN) are more 
refined and optimized. For instance, I would say Perl DBI is faster at 
accessing databases than PHP's PEAR.  You don't have to use PEAR if you 
find the overhead too much. And you don't have to use DBI, but DBI is 
so mature I don't know why you wouldn't want to. You could also get 
"compilers" for both languages to speed up your site.

I've seen some really slow Perl sites and some really slow PHP sites. 
The learning curve for PHP is far easier than that for Perl, so you 
probably have many more people using PHP for their sites that aren't 
really that good at scripting. And how many of those slow PHP sites 
were generated from Dreamweaver? If you did extensive tests, I would 
say Perl would probably come out ahead. But that doesn't mean you can't 
create a PHP site that is really fast.

Sorry, I know I didn't answer your question.


On Nov 16, 2004, at 10:54 AM, Merlin wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> it came to my attention that most of the high traffic portals are 
> using perl in the backend. Those sites do also apear to me to be very 
> fast in comparison to most php sites. Are there any known performance 
> comperissons between the two available? Or can one say that PHP or 
> Perl is faster about x percent in general compared to the other one?
>
> thanx for any hint,
>
> Merlin
>
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Brent Baisley
Systems Architect
Landover Associates, Inc.
Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577

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