Hacker News Reader

I remember looking at BSON de/serializers for some perceived performance issue a while back, ruby was only marginally slower than PHP for the same task, which was just pulling big record sets back from the db. Can you elaborate?

View on HN

When was that? I ask because PHP made large improvements to performance in the last few years.

Sometimes it's more than 2x faster than before. They now have JIT and are planing to have an intermediate language for even more speed.

Most PHP stdlib code is pure C/C++ so it tends to be very fast, but I'm guessing Ruby is the same.

It was about maybe late last year/Jan this year. When you say intermediate language, do you mean PHP has a bytecode interpreter instead of AST? At the time I looked at it, to convince myself there was no issue with Ruby, I actually hooked up the same table/query to PHP and used PHP's excellent profiling tools, then compared those to the Rails profiler. There wasn't a great difference. PHP was faster sure, but there was definitely no knocking Ruby's speed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com