[ILUG] [OT] Perl vs php?

[Dave Wilson]

On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 12:13:18PM -0000, Barry Redmond wrote:
> Anyone have any thoughts on which is best for web server 
> database searches?  I'm looking at linux+apache+mysql+perl 
> versus linux+apache+mysql+php.  Measures of goodness are 
> execution speed, and ease of programming (starting from a 
> reasonable knowledge of perl but no specific knowledge of php).  

For ease of programming: Perl is always fun, but PHP is well
documented and surprisingly intutive. It only took a few hours
total to build slashnull.org (linux+apache+mysql+php) - including
installing the machine and learning PHP from scratch. I was *really*
impressed at how quickly the code just seemed to fall together in PHP.

For execution speed: no contest, choose PHP and build it into the web
server. Forking a separate CGI process is a serious overhead, and Mod::Perl
is a bit heavy to have multiple copies permanently resident in RAM.

PHP gives you a light but powerful web server with a direct interface
to the database, no messing. It's the neatest architecture since
AOLserver+Tcl, and a lot easier to debug.

> The database contains two tables with about 40000 rows in one 
> and 20000 in the other.

Decent size. All my databases have been tiddlers. But this will be
down to the speed of the database, not the web server or the scripting
language. Can anyone vouch for MySQL under these circumstances?

Dave

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