This all started in a little debate between me and a friend of mine who I
think is as much a PERL zealot as I am a PHP zealot (I was briefly pondering
the idea of a Win32 API extension for PHP), and the results were rather
surprising -- to me, at least..
It all started when I asked him what PERL had that PHP didn't in terms of
language (not taking community, modules, etc. into an account). We both
believed that the two would be very similiar in speed -- he thought PERL
would be a little faster but not enough to be noticeable. For the first
test, I went with a program that computed prime numbers between 2 and 10000,
using no form of caching or anything like that. I gave him the PHP source
with the task of writing something in PERL as close to the original PHP
source as possible. The results:
(note: I didn't know if PERL had PHP's continue(2), hence why I used the
slightly less efficient method here:)
prime.php:
#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php
echo "2\n";
for($check = 3 ; $check < 10000 ; $check += 2) {
$prime = 1;
$half = (int) $check / 2;
for($against = 2 ; $against <= $half ; ++$against) {
if(!($check % $against)) {
$prime = 0;
break;
}
}
if($prime) echo "$check\n";
}
prime.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# print "2\n";
my $num;
for ($num = 3; $num < 10000; $num+=2)
{
my $prime = 1;
for $check ( 2 .. int($num/2) )
{
if ($num % $check == 0)
{
$prime = 0;
last;
}
}
# print "$num\n" if $prime;
}
The test machine is an AMD Duron 700 MHz using an a-bit KT7A motherboard
with 256 MB of PC100 SDRAM. uname -a reports "Linux ulysses.venura.net
2.4.17-ulysses1 #1 Sat Dec 29 14:44:46 PST 2001 i686 unknown", PHP 4.2.1 was
configured with --enable-inline-optimization --prefix=[somepath], PERL 5.6.1
was configured with -O3 (among other options) (PHP compiles with -g -O2 with
no 'easy' (at-configure-time) way to change that, to my knowledge).
Both programs were ran once normally to verify they actually generated prime
numbers, and then the bash "time" command was used to time them, piping
their output to /dev/null to prevent that from being a factor. I re-ran the
tests a few times with results consistently similiar to those listed here:
The results:
[dewin@ulysses profiling]$ time ./prime.php > /dev/null
real 0m14.465s
user 0m8.610s
sys 0m0.070s
[dewin@ulysses profiling]$ time ./prime.pl > /dev/null
real 0m5.302s
user 0m3.180s
sys 0m0.000s
A second system, with PHP compiled the same way and a PERL 5.6.1 binary
distributed by Red Hat, 1.2 ghz with 442 MB of RAM:
[root@mrr-016 law]# time ./prime.pl > /dev/null
real 0m2.078s
user 0m2.040s
sys 0m0.010s
[root@mrr-016 law]# time ./prime.php > /dev/null
real 0m5.512s
user 0m5.430s
sys 0m0.010s
Comments? I was expecting the numbers to be very similiar -- rather shocked
that the PERL ended up being about 2.5x as fast as PHP was.
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