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

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Daniël Mantione wrote:

> 
> 
> Op Tue, 6 Mar 2007, schreef Jonas Maebe:
> 
> > 
> > On 6 mrt 2007, at 13:16, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> > 
> > > > 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.
> > 
> > Well, he explicitly mentioned the problem that Mantis has: we use it in
> > combination with MySQL (I don't even know if it supports another database),
> > and Mantis does a lot of joins (don't know if they are ugly though).
> 
> That is not the real problem with Mantis. Mantis views a database record 
> as an object with methods and fields. If you modify a field the record is 
> retrieved from the database and stored again.
> 
> So, during a page request hundreds of queries can get executed, instead of 
> requesting all data for the page at once, Mantis uses one query per 
> record.

This is not the only problem. To be able to do multiple MySQL queries at
once (the MySQL C client does not allow this), PHP must retrieve the whole
record set at once, and keep it in memory, thus wasting a lot of memory.

That has nothing to do with Mantis, but is a design problem of MySQL - and
thus PHP. But unfortunately, MySQL is used most for PHP web apps, it gets
shipped as the default.

Michael.