I''m a 6 year java developer and with all the hubbub about RoR in the past year I''ve been playing with it. I''ve been reading articles about performance and scalability, etc, everyone has their own opinions. When it comes down to it, there are a bunch of large scale RoR websites in production so obviously scalability is not a problem. But from some of the articles about scalability issues, basically it got me thinking...what about PHP? Meaning doesn''t PHP have the same performance problems that Ruby does when running in a webserver (like apache). I know it has the same scalability issues (can''t share memory - so can''t have a connection pool, etc etc) but... Why aren''t people running around saying "PHP needs to be run in Fast CGI"? I found the following comment on a blog ( http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?anchor=rails_is_8_times_slower) and I''m wondering why a PHP page really out performs the others... If anyone has any ideas, let me know, I''m really curious. Thanks Anyway, I''m not making this stuff up. Plain Old Apache serving up the same file (as in, the end result of saving the output of the Rails/Java web app) managed 6,000 req/s. Put in FastCGI and run the Rails app in a ''production'' RAILS_ENV, with caching on, and that speed (all that''s being rendered is a view using a layout. There is no DB access [for this figure.]) drops down to 62 req/s. This didn?t drop by much when accessing the database (56 req/s.) The same page is served by Tomcat at around 500 req/s. (with database access + Hibernate = ~300 req/s.) Did I mention that PHP outperformed all options, serving up 1200 req/s (800 req/s with DB access)? That doesn?t mean I?d use PHP for any serious web development. :-) I also tested mod_python: 200 req/s (150 with DB.) I tested mod_perl; 500 req/s (~300 req/s with DB.) I should also test ASP.NET/Mono<http://ASP.NET/Mono> . I don''t really see how this is huge news or anything. Ruby isn''t/wasn''t designed to be faster than Java, and given enough memory/CPU, Java can and does outperform C (the same page in static JSP running under Resin and the JRockit VM gets served at 10,000 req/s. Awesome. I even added a timestamp to the output just to make things a bit more dynamic, and the throughput stayed the same.) _______________________________________________ Rails mailing list Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails