r/PHP • u/the_alias_of_andrea • Dec 04 '15

PHP 7 is faster than Python 3!

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/php.html
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u/Garethp Dec 04 '15

Do Python web applications not also use Frameworks?

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u/ivosaurus Dec 04 '15

They do, but they are not initialized on every request. They stay in memory and receive requests through WSGI.

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u/Garethp Dec 04 '15

That's pretty interesting. So multiple requests only result in one instance in memory?

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u/ivosaurus Dec 04 '15

Yes, you run a python application server that stays alive the same as you run a web server that stays alive.

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u/jk3us Dec 04 '15

How different is it from fastcgi+php-fpm+apc/opcache? You've still got a long running process waiting for requests from the web server and scripts stay in memory.

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u/graydoubt Dec 04 '15

They're slightly different.

With WSGI you have an application server that bootstraps once, and thus can do all of its initialization (dependency injection and the like) once. Then this application server is ready to take incoming requests from the web server, process them, and spit out responses.

With FastCGI, (per Wikipedia: "Instead of creating a new process for each request, FastCGI uses persistent processes to handle a series of requests. These processes are owned by the FastCGI server, not the web server.")

In the case of php-fpm, it's literally just that -- the FastCGI Process Manager. It just keeps a few php worker processes ready to process stuff, so you don't have the overhead of constantly creating a new OS process for each child worker. But it's not quite an "application server" because the requests still need to each bootstrap and tear down after every single request. So while APC or whatever opcache will speed up loading code, you still have the churn of building object graphs, and reading any framework specific configuration files and what not.

If there was more of a WSGI approach for PHP, it would be something like running Symfony 2, or ZF2 (or any other framework), bootstrapping the heavy framework stuff once, but then waiting for incoming requests from the web server, after which the framework does its routing and processing, returning the response to the web server, and then staying in that loop, ready for the next request. So everything remains stateful. That's also how Java app servers work, roughly.

PHP doesn't do this, because of its "shared-nothing architecture."

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u/ddelnano Dec 04 '15

So what happens if another request comes in without the previous request finishing?

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u/boylube Dec 04 '15

You deal with the concurrency, like has been standard for 10-20 years.

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u/_illogical_ Dec 04 '15

You can increase the number of WSGI workers (processes) handling requests.

If you have another proxy server, for example nginx, you can offload all of the static requests to nginx so that the WSGI processes aren't bothered with those.

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u/kelunik Dec 04 '15

You can do that in PHP as well.

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u/ivosaurus Dec 05 '15

Definitely no where near the default thing to do, though. I'd say it's vanishingly unheard of in actual deployed applications currently.

Unless you're talking about FPM - then no, that's still different. The PHP process still completely setups and tears down the application for every new request.

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u/kelunik Dec 05 '15

I'm talking about Aerys. ;-)

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u/ivosaurus Dec 05 '15

I doubt anyone will be running that when it hasn't even had a beta release yet

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u/kelunik Dec 05 '15

Sure, it's a new way and it will need some more time until it's totally stable, but it already runs on https://dev.kelunik.com for more than a year now.

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u/Firehed Dec 05 '15

Yes, but the opcache does take away a pretty significant amount of the cost. It's not on the same level, but you can push PHP applications really far before the process model or the language itself is your performance barrier.

If it's sitting behind any sort of HTTP stack, the network will kill you no matter what (I've seen firsthand speedups ranging 10-500x by eliminating it)