Thanks to binary42 who pm'd me with some notes about using ps ... being expensive, I did
the benchmarking tests again with the memory usage checks turned off in both apps, and got widely different results:
ab -n 2000 -c 20 http://__URL__/
Ruby/Sinatra/Apache/Passenger: 603 requests/sec
PHP/Limonade/Apache: 323.85 requests/sec
but the big winner is:
Ruby/Sinatra/Thin(1.2.7): 1747.20 requests/sec or 1987.36 requests/sec (in production mode)
This is in no way intended as a pro / against either Ruby or PHP.
SO PLEASE DON'T USE IT AS SUCH! Thanks
I prefer to code in Ruby / Sinatra, and would ideally not use any other language, but sometimes reality sets in, and I have to do some website work in PHP.
While converting a fairly simple Sinatra app into PHP I realised that the memory usage was widely different.
I have therefore tried to create two almost identical simple applications in Ruby's Sinatra framework and in PHP's Limonade framework.
When running both of these apps on my Mac OS X 10.6 - system, I get these results:
- Ruby (1.8.7 p72) / Sinatra (1.0) / Apache 2 (Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 2.2.11 )
[~]$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://sinatra-app.local/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking sinatra-app.local (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache/2.2.13
Server Hostname: sinatra-app.local
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 1585 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 1.514 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 188200 bytes
HTML transferred: 158500 bytes
Requests per second: 66.06 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 151.379 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 15.138 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 121.41 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.2 0 1
Processing: 32 150 222.0 44 765
Waiting: 32 149 222.0 43 764
Total: 32 150 222.0 44 765
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 44
66% 52
75% 67
80% 384
90% 417
95% 750
98% 764
99% 765
100% 765 (longest request)
[~]$
[~]$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://sinatra-app.local/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking sinatra-app.local (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache/2.2.13
Server Hostname: sinatra-app.local
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 1585 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 1.491 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 188200 bytes
HTML transferred: 158500 bytes
Requests per second: 67.08 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 149.084 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 14.908 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 123.28 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.3 0 3
Processing: 49 146 151.2 74 478
Waiting: 48 146 151.2 74 478
Total: 49 147 151.1 74 478
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 74
66% 92
75% 119
80% 410
90% 443
95% 458
98% 470
99% 478
100% 478 (longest request)
[~]$
- PHP (5.3.0) / Limonade (edge) / Apache 2 (Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 2.2.11 )
[~]$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://php-app.local/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking php-app.local (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache/2.2.13
Server Hostname: php-app.local
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 1638 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 0.401 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 211500 bytes
HTML transferred: 163800 bytes
Requests per second: 249.28 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 40.116 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.012 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 514.86 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.8 0 5
Processing: 14 38 13.5 34 80
Waiting: 14 38 13.5 34 80
Total: 15 39 13.4 35 81
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 35
66% 42
75% 46
80% 49
90% 61
95% 64
98% 76
99% 81
100% 81 (longest request)
[~]$
The reason behind this is to hopefully find the answer to these two simple questions:
1. WHY IS THE MEMORY USAGE SEEMINGLY SO MUCH HIGHER IN THE Ruby (Sinatra) APP THAN IN THE PHP (Limonade) APP ??
Answer: slowness in Ruby/Sinatra app was due to expensive shell-ing out action, once removed the Ruby/Sinatra app is almost twice as fast as the PHP app. See update notes at top of page.
If you know the answers to these questions, or could explain things for me please do so!
Please do NOT use this as amunition in some infantile "PHP rocks, Ruby sucks" kind of stuff. It was created to gain a better understanding of the two programming languages and environments.