Are you seriously comparing PHP with Java?
Not saying Java is the best, but dude, at least it was not designed by monkeys.
Not saying Java is the best, but dude, at least it was not designed by monkeys.
Now let's take a look at some popular Java apps: Eclipse, SAP's frontend, Lotus Notes, Atlassian JIRA/Confluence, JDownloader... recognize the pattern of slowness?
PHP might have been designed by monkeys (and many of the early design mistakes are gone by now, anyway!), but at least PHP kept the 10-abstraction-layers-minimum monkeys away. Also, a PHP web (or CLI, or GUI) app will in most cases eat far less RAM than a Java app of same functionality.
Also, PHP projects are far faster to develop because the intermediate step of compiling is removed, and it's far easier (and faster) to deploy PHP projects than a Java web app.
Edit: did some quick measurement on a RPi 1, java hello world vs PHP hello world vs C hello world:
javac takes 16.8s wall time, 28MB peak RSS. Running the program itself is 1.99s wall time, 13MB peak RSS.
PHP in contrast is a single process with 0.7s wall time, 14MB peak RSS.
C takes 1.24s wall time for the compile, 15MB peak RSS. The resulting program takes 0.01s wall time, 1MB peak RSS.
Versions are openjdk 7u91-2.6.3-1+rpi1, php 5.6.14+dfsg-1+b1 and gcc 5.2.1-23+rpi1.
That compile time of javac is simply... wtf.
Java? Not so much.
The biggest hits to performance however seem to stem from components that you can happily do without -- annotation magic for example, and the Doctrine ORM.
Facebook had to develop their own PHP-to-C++ transpiler to achieve something vaguely resembling useful performance. I wouldn't quote that as positive example…
I just don't understand PHP bashers always using Facebook as a metric to bash PHP. "Oh PHP is so horrible, the second (sometimes even first ranked) most visited site on the internet had to write their own PHP-to-C++ transpiler to handle the load. Clearly PHP isn't a good choice for my 3 user site! I need that performance!"
Get over yourselves already. Every language has it's strengths and weaknesses.
Yes, Facebook had to write their own interpreter, but you also know what? Facebook also actively helps the PHP community and is ushering the community too. So anything Facebook creates they open source and PHP7 has taken cues from them. The whole net benefits from it.
Not to mention the next biggest website that is powered by PHP is Wikipedia, whom uses stock PHP to serve their sites.
Facebook has so much interactions and that, that they warrant the need for what they did. 99.9999% of most people don't need that. Not even Wikipedia. They just render a html page. Done.
Your criticism of Java for being slow is 1) very 2006 and 2) incorrectly based on desktop apps which require JVM restart and warmup time before they get going.
Put Java on the server and see the speeds. Using spark as your web framework, it's possible to achieve rates of over 40k requests per second ( I've seen claims of 160k requests per second after sufficient JVM warmup).
Anyway, calling wordpress or drupal "high performance" is a joke.
As part of my day job we regularly deploy Wordpress sites that efficiently handle hundreds of thousands of page views per day (and yes I realize that's not HUGE but it's not trivial either) and we do it on cheap hardware that would barely run the stock JVM, let alone an actual Java app server.
"High performance" is relative to your costs & needs, and it's all about using the right tool for the job. If you know how to configure and optimize PHP applications properly, you can make them extremely performant.
Either way, it seems you're arbitrarily ignoring whole classes of apps or languages because of some outdated bias (that i bet you just accepted from others and never tested yourself), so you're obviously not interested in an objective discussion.
I run two stock JVM instances and Redis on a $10 DO VPS that serves ~700k pageviews per day
> arbitrarily ignoring whole classes of apps or languages because of some outdated bias (that i bet you just accepted from others and never tested yourself)
hmm
I'll admit that my experience with Java web apps was never against bare JVMs, but against app servers (Liferay, etc). How common is it for people to roll their own no-framework bare web apps in Java?
In case you're not familiar with it, Dropwizard is a collection of libraries packaged up with some conventions and glue; it uses Jetty to serve HTTP and also integrates Jersey and Jackson (RESTful routing and JSON encoding) so that you don't have to do it yourself.
Well, these two platforms are by far the leader in the CMS space. It's either usability, ease of administration or speed that keeps people using WP/Drupal over alternatives in other languages/frameworks.
I've never worked with a CMS or web app - in any language - that didn't include caching as a core part of the performance layer once it reaches a certain amount of load..
I'm sure it's possible, with enough money to throw at hardware, to scale without it, but why would you? Caching is a completely valid optimization approach in my view..
We should not be needing bare metal servers with 4 GHz CPUs to serve a non-interactive site with ~4000 visitors a day. Yet, without full-page caching (i.e., bypass Wordpress/PHP entirely and serve .html files straight from nginx), the servers would melt under the load.
Rendering twenty images and forty text fields out of database should not take several seconds on a modern server. Yet, Wordpress has no problems taking a dozen seconds even under light load conditions – mind you, that's time purely spent in PHP, for rendering, not on the database.
I'm not making any specific value statement about your setup here, I'm just surprised by what you're seeing on your end.
Still, we're usually seeing a lot better performance with everything that's not wordpress – be it our in-house PHP framework, or node, Rails or Python apps.
Sidenote: why doesn't the mysqld configure script suggest various performance levels upon setup, based on detected hardware (RAM, disk, CPU cores)?
Both can be plugged into memcache and friends, and if done right you can put in Cloudflare or other frontend caching systems in front.
Biggest performance +1, though, is enabling php opcache.
Once you've defined the requirements, restrictions, and personal abilities, only then you can have a meaningful discussion on what the "best" language is - and even then there is more than one answer.