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You linked to Computer Language Benchmarks without even knowing the version of PHP they are running.

PHP 5.2.2-pl1-gentoo (cli) (built: May 8 2007 09:51:53) says on the Computer Language Benchmarks. I guess PHP 5.2.6-2+b1 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Jul 22 2008 21:03:43) and 5.2.2 are quite close. Am I mistaken?

You are right, I missed that, thanks

You’re comparing a JIT’d VM based language versus an interpreted dynamically typed scripting language? And you’re shocked the performance is so off? What's next, C++ vs Javascript? OMG...

Embarrassing case study.

Seems like the server is down.

We keep bringing it up, but we are hitting some artificial limits like kmemsize imposed by the hosting :(

This was a great post. Not because of the results but because of how the results were obtained. Seemed quite unbiased to me, which I like. Thanks.

such a comparison is idiocy by definition

Such a statement is idiocy by definition.

Jevgeni, no reason to start a flame war in this site. That's not why we are here. We all know that php, just like ruby and python, is slower than java. And to be honest, the only embarrassing thing here was you comment, as opposed to your benchmark.

It's not my benchmark, I just posted it here. And two orders of magnitude *is* embarrassingly slower. So if someone calls it idiocy I'd like to see some argumentation.

It looks to me that you forgot to enable opcode cache, trust me, it reduce the time it takes to compile the code by up to 90%. PHP is an interpreted language. This means that each time a PHP generated page is requested, the server must read in the various files needed and "compile" them into something the machine can understand (opcode).

Also, there are alternatives to the standard PHP interpreter, so if you consider the standard to be slow, try benchmarking your code with another interpreter.

So, for me to take your results seriously, you need to: 1) Benchmark your code with opcode cache enabled, or 2) Benchmark it with different interpreters.

no need to be rude