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Choosing between PHP, Lua, Go

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on Fri, 06/27/2014 - 18:59
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I have recently spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a better way to implement RESTful service that serve data in JSON. This is because most of our work these days involves writing client-side JavaScript apps that present a rich UI in the browser and then do all server-side interactions via AJAX. In pursuit of the best way to implement RESTful service on the backend, I have tried my hands at Go programming language, D programming language, Lua and of course Java and PHP. I was assuming that the Go or Lua would be much faster than PHP. Well, it turns out that at least without special optimizations, that is not the case.

I wrote the following programs to compare their performance:

<?php

header('Content-Type: application/json');

$db = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=db;charset=utf8', 'user', 'pass');
$stmt = $db->query("SELECT * FROM node");
$result = array();
$result['list'] = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
echo json_encode($result);

 

<?php

define('DRUPAL_ROOT', getcwd());

require_once DRUPAL_ROOT . '/includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_DATABASE);
// drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

header('Content-Type: application/json');

$stmt = db_query("SELECT * FROM node");
$result = array();
$result['list'] = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
echo json_encode($result);

 

json = require "cjson"

function json_result(key, data)
  local result = {}
  result[key] = data
  ngx.say(json.encode(result))
end

function json_error(...)
  local result = {}
  result["message"] = string.format(...)
  ngx.status = ngx.HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
  ngx.say(json.encode(result))
end

mysql = require "resty.mysql"

local db, err = mysql:new()
if not db then
  json_error("failed to instantiate mysql: %s", err)
  return
end

db:set_timeout(1000) -- 1 sec

local ok, err, errno, sqlstate = db:connect{
  host = "127.0.0.1",
  port = 3306,
  database = "db",
  user = "user",
  password = "pass",
  max_packet_size = 1024 * 1024
}

if not ok then
    json_error("failed to connect: %s: %d %d", err, errno, sqlstate)
    return
end

result, err, errno, sqlstate = db:query("SELECT * FROM node")

if not result then
  json_error("failed to query: %s: %d %d", err, errno, sqlstate)
end

json_result("list", result)

 

The above programs simply query a table and return all rows and columns from that table as a JSON array.

And then I hit the above programs with a bit of load using 'ab' HTTP load testing command. Following are the results ...

Tags
drupal
php
go
lua
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