Performance comparison of PHP and JSP as server-side scripting languages

Abstract

The dynamic scripting language PHP has become enormously popular for implementing lightweight web applications, and is widely used as a server-side scripting language for web servers. To contrast the performance of PHP and JSP for this purpose, we used the SPECweb2005 benchmark, which provides three application scenarios implemented in both PHP and JSP. This paper describes and contrasts the results of SPECweb2005 performance benchmark testing performed on different configurations of PHP and JSP using the popular web servers Apache and Lighttpd. Despite the execution overhead of interpretation in PHP engines observed in micro benchmarks, the experimental result of SPECweb2005 benchmark yields valuable performance data for web server implementers. The efficiency of scripting language runtimes still matters for the end-to-end performance. However, once carefully architected and tuned, the language runtime is less of a bottleneck than the web server performance itself. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.