Re: aws vs ruby rails or php? how much faster?

["Thomas Løcke" <thomas@12boo.net>]

On 04/22/2013 11:17 PM, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:
> What kind of request was tested with this benchmark? Was this static
> content delivery? Dynamic content? If this was dynamic content, then how
> was it defined, as there is no way to have a PHP reference file
> implemented in Ada (too much different)?
>
> That's not a surprise to me well designed Ada outperformed PHP and Ruby,
> but I still would like more details.


It was an in-house test we did to figure out how different frameworks
performed. We tested both templating systems and purely static content.

The differences were massive. Compared to Ruby, PHP and Python, AWS was
so much faster, that testing it hardly made any sense.

We didn't go out of our way to optimize anything. All frameworks were
running in out of the box mode. The assumption was that a decent
framework should be able to perform without forcing the user to learn
about all sorts of arcane tricks to make it go faster. Also we assumed
that X amount of time used to optimize a framework would result in
fairly similar performance gains across the board.

What we did not do was test things that relied on the performance of
external systems, such as databases. We focused very narrowly on the
straight-up performance of serving simple static and templated content
over plain HTTP. This was mostly a benchmark of the frameworks ability
to handle huge loads of HTTP requests.

A few years ago I did a test[1] against node.js, mainly to prove that
the threading model of AWS was not as inferior to the event model of
node.js as many claimed. That test was equally simple and
un-scientific, but it did get the point across. Please note that this
test is very old and that node.js has since surpassed AWS. It still
stands though that using a threaded webserver does not necessarily
equal slow performance.

It would be interesting to do some of these tests in a more controlled
manner, and in an open forum where it is known what and how tests are
done. Also we could learn more about AWS, and perhaps take a look at
how we can make it go even faster. :o)

[1] http://wiki.ada-dk.org/aws_vs_node.js

-- 
Thomas Løcke | thomas@12boo.net | http://12boo.net