Switching from PHP to Ruby - is it the answer to performance?

Question

Hi everyone,

I get more often the answer, when asking performance related stuff regarding PHP applications, that PHP really isn't the language for high-performance applications, and that a compiled language really is the way to go. The only thing holding me back to PHP is that it's what I have learned to work with for some while now and the development is quite rapid.

So, is PHP a thing of the past and should be put aside in web applications in favour of Ruby, for instance?

Update:

Premature optimization is usually what I have gotten as an answer when being too focused on optimizing stuff too early in the process, but I feel that it's quite far away from choosing the right language which has the best prerequisites.

Thanks

Answer 1

Changing your programming language from one to another isn't going to result in massive performance increases or losses. Changing the way you write code is more likely to have much greater effects.

Answer 2

If you switch from PHP to Ruby, let it be for another reason than performance.

Ruby is not a compiled language either, and the last time I looked it was not significantly faster than PHP. If your language interpreter is the bottleneck, switch to a compiled language like C++, C# or Java.

Here are some random benchmarks.

Answer 3

I used PHP and switched to Ruby for other reasons than performance.

If this is what you want, take a closer look at what takes the time.

There are PHP solutions like the opcode cache xcache and a lib for Memcached that help you speed up your app.

Answer 4

There are tons of good reasons to switch from PHP to Ruby. Performance is not one of them. Some of the largest sites on the web use PHP. It's perfectly capable of performing well if you use it right.

If working on a high-performance application, there are many things to consider when optimizing for speed:

• Where are your bottlenecks? At the database or application level?
• Are you using caching to speed up requests?
• Can you get a performance boost via load balancing or separating the database server from the web server. Hardware is cheap, programmers are not.
• Consider using a performance optimized language on the back end, but keep using PHP on the front end.

Answer 5

As far as I know PHP is faster than Ruby (and Ruby is much more memory consuming). However I really love to write in Ruby.

In most cases PHP is fast enough. But for Facebook it wasn't fast enough, so they created they own solution and shared it. In my opinion for 99% of web applications PHP is enough. @macek has a good point!

Answer 6

When it comes to performance, the dispute between PHP and Ruby users is almost entirely religious and fanboy-ish. Which one of the two you use will probably not affect your performance that much.

More likely the problem is code that could use some cleanup and/or optimization.

If one writes slow PHP code, he or she will probably write slow Ruby code, too. It's not a matter of the tools but how they are used.

Answer 7

Ruby and PHP are both late-binding languages, and while Ruby has some optimization over PHP, if you are having performance issues your code is the first place to look. Also, as Joel and Jeff once said on the podcast, if you can't identify your top five pain points with a language, you don't know enough about the language to justify learning an entirely new language for purely performance related reasons.

Answer 8

Compiled code like C# can be faster but it seems like you can get stuff going (development wise) faster in Ruby. Stick with what you know, or if you want to be more marketable, pickup Rails or ASP.NET.

As with any web app, caching and client side code will make your app more responsive.