Two very popular and widely used languages for building dynamic web sites are Perl and PHP. They make up two thirds of the "P" in the Linux Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack. How does their performance, using mod_perl and mod_php, compare for everyday web programming? I attempted to find out.

New in the rematch

In the rematch, I updated the Perl HTML code based on suggestions from comments to the orignal article. It should create a more accurate comparison with PHP. Though the main goal is to compare the performance of mod_perl and mod_php, I added a TCL CGI program to compare against Perl CGI. Finally, the hardware used for testing was significantly faster.

The machine

My new test bed was a DELL PowerEdge 2850 server with the following specifications and software:

3.2 Ghz Intel Xeon
4G RAM
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
Apache 2.0.46
MySQL 3.23.58
Perl 5.8.0
PHP 4.3.2
TCL 8.3.5

This system is a monster compared to the 700 Mhz server from the original test. I expected the results to reflect it.

The method

Full Story.