[fpc-pascal] CGI (with Free Pascal) vs PHP

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Chuck Burkins wrote:

> On 3/6/07, Florian Klaempfl <florian at freepascal.org> wrote:
> 
> >
> > (Pascal) compiler based CGI is magnitudes faster than PHP, less resource
> > consuming and much easier to maintain. The only advantage of PHP is that
> > is easier to use for beginners and that's probably the only reason why
> > PHP is so popular: you can hack quickly something together but
> > maintainance, performance etc. are nightmares.
> 
> With all due respect (and that *is* a lot of respect), I disagree. I
> leave out the relative speed of PHP vs. compiled pascal, as I've never
> use Pascal in CGI. I have got over 100,000 lines of PHP code in
> service, so I think I can safely comment on that.
> 
> PHP does not in any way burden a modern web server, at least when used
> as an apache module. My test server at work has 128MB of RAM and only
> occasionally does it slow down noticably, typically when MySQL is
> working on a particularly ugly join. In my experience, the speed of
> well written  PHP is indistinguishable from the speed of the same
> static HTML, as long as you leave out any database interaction (and
> Pascal of course would have database interaction as well).

Well. Since we switched to Mantis (PHP based, Apache module) for the
bug-tracker, we have nothing but problems with the webserver.

So obviously, your mileage may vary.

Michael.