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Performance Comparison of PHP and JSP as Server-Side Scripting Languages
MaterialSource:Notesin Computer Science
Author: Scott Trent;Michiaki Tatsubori; Toyotaro Suzumura;Akihiko Tozawa and TamiyaOnodera
1 Introduction
The dynamic scripting language PHP(PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) has becomeenormously popular for implementing lightweight web applications,and is widely used toaccess databases and other middleware.Apache module popularity surveys performed bySecurity Space in October 2007 indicate that 37%of Apache servers have PHP supportenabled,making it the most popular Apache module by 10 percentage points.Businessesare quickly realizing the powerful combination of a service oriented architectureenvironment with dynamic scripting languages like PHP.However,we believe that thereare still critical performance issues involving PHP which remain to be investigated.
This paper focuses on the use of dynamic scripting languages to implement webserver front-end interfaces.This corresponds with the way that the industry standard webserver performance benchmark SPECweb2005 utilizes PHP and JSP ( JavaServerPages).In this case, scripts are used for the implementation of dynamic page generation,rather than the realization of complex business logic.This contrasts with the traditionaluses of complex JSP-based business logic implementation.While there are numerousstudies on dynamic web content, this paper complements these studies with detailedanalysis focusing on PHP. For example, following the performance study on CGI(Common Gateway Interface) based web servers for dynamic content by Yeager&McGrath back in 1995, researchers and practitioners have been examining theperformance of more recent dynamic Webcontent generation technologies.These works,however, handle application scenarios where servlet front-ends implement relativelycomplexbusiness logic.
Although Warner and Worley discuss the importance of also using PHP withSPECweb2005, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to publish adetailed analysis of SPECweb2005 experimental results using both PHP and JSP. Thedetailed analysis of PHP and JSP performance based on SPECweb2005 offered by thispaper enables designers and implementers of web servers to understand the relativeperformance and through put of different versions and configurations of PHP and JSP.
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2 Multi-tier Web Server Architecture:Lightweight Front-EndUsing PHP/JSP
Developers typically use PHP to implement a front-end interface to dynamic Webcontent generators,which are combined with web server software and back-end serversto provide dynamic content.The web server directly handles requests for static contentand forwards requests for dynamic content to the dynamic content generator. Thedynamic content generator, supported by back-end servers, executes code which realizesthe business logic of a web site and stores dynamic state. Back-end servers may beimplemented as a straight-forward database, or may be more complex servers handlingthe business logic of the web site. The front-end implementation may vary fromheavy-weight business logic handlers to lightweight clients composing content receivedfrom back-end servers.
This paper focuses on multi-tier web site development scenarios utilizing suchlightweight front-ends, supported by one or more layers o f heavy-weight back-ends.Thisassumption is reasonable when considering Service-Oriented environments where PHPscripts are used to implement a "mash-up"of services provided elsewhere, in addition tothe case of simple web sites such as bulletin boards where PHP scripts are just a wrapperto a database. Within the scenarios described in this paper, the dynamic contentgenerator provides client implementation in addition to page composition. It connects tothe back-end server through a network using either standard protocols such as HTTP orapp lication/middleware-spec ific proto co ls.
JSP technology can be considered an alternative to PHP in implementing suchfront-ends.While it is part of the Java Servlet framework,developers typically use JSP toimplement lightweight front-ends.Both PHP and JSP allow developers to write HTMLembedded code. In fact, although there are language inherent differences between PHPand Java, the use ofPHP scripts and JSP files can be very similar.
The objective of the experiments detailed in this paper is to measure theperformance of lightweight front-end dynamic content generation written in PHP and JSPwith popular web servers such as Apache and Lighttpd. This web server architecturescenario involves users who access a web server with pages written in plain static HTML,as well as JSP and PHP scripts which mix scripting language with HTML code. Theconfiguration assumed within the paper is a typical one,where web server software, suchas Apache,distinguishes between pure HTML, JSP,and PHP respectively with suffixes
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such as .html, .jsp,and.php.HTML code is directly returned to the requesting end-user’sweb browser,where JSP and PHP pages are respectively parsed by the Tomcat scriptengine and the PHP runtime engine which both provide pure HTML which is forwardedto the end-user on a remote system.A common point between JSP and PHP is thatimplementations which perform well have a dynamically compiled and cached byte code.For example, the Java runtime used by the Tomcat script engine which we used performsmuch better when the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler is enabled to create efficient cachednative runtime code. Similarly, the Zend PHP runtime we used also performssignificantly better when the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is enabled, in which APCstores PHP byte codes compiled from the script source code in shared memory for futurere us e.
3 Language Runtime Performance Micro Benchmarking
To understand the difference in performance characteristics between PHP and Javaat the language runtime levelwe compared the following engines using a series of microbenchmark te sts:
-PHP 4.4.7
-PHP 5.2.3
-Java 5 with Just-In-Time(JIT)compilation(IBM J9 VM 1.5.0 Build 2.3)
-Java 5 without Just-In-Time(JIT)compilation(same as above)
The PHP language framework allows developers to extend the language with libraryfunctions written in C. These functions,which are known as "extensions", are thenavailable to be used within PHP scripts. The PHP runtime provides a variety ofextensions for string manipulation, file handling,networking,and so forth.S ince our firstgoal was to understand the performance of the PHP runtime itself,we conducted ourexperiments without the use of extensions.We developed the following microbenc hmarks:
-A quick sort benchmark which sorts 100 integers,
-A Levenshtein benchmark which measures the similarity between two strings of 56charac ter s,
-AFibonacci benchmark which calculates the 15th value in a Fibonacci series withtwo arb itrary starting values.
These PHP benchmarks were implemented entirely with PHP language primitivesand avoided the use of PHP extensions. The Java versions also focused on usinglanguage primitives rather than standard classes.We compared the total run time of
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