Live data from Hacker News

"Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'"

skitch.com

1–10 of 31 posts

Re: "Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'"

#6
Maybe I'm slow but it seems to me that the language is never the bottleneck for web applications. It seems to me that the bottleneck is in the db which is language agnostic for all general purposes.

And anything that is slow with just Ruby can be solved by throwing money at it.

Re: "Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'"

#7
post #5

Stats for Rails?

"Next was comparing Merb against other ruby options. Returning directly from the Merb router kills everything, but there aren’t many scenarios you could use that. Sinatra is just slightly faster than returning from the Merb controller, which both outperform Rails by a 3-4x. Rails itself still kills CakePHP."

Re: "Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'"

#10

Oh, god. How many times does this point need to be made? Yeah, cool. The compiler is fast. Probably 1% of all websites on the internet ever manage to get enough traffic to make the language matter, right?

To be frank, at this point in time when I'm developing for the web, just about the only thing I care about when it comes to what language I'm using is that it's not PHP.

I understand why people use PHP, but as someone who has a decent amount of experience with a variety of languages, I really want a language that's designed sanely, especially for things like web-(sites|apps). I'll gladly take a hit on the language-speed side, or on the ease-of-finding-hosting side for the sake of not having to put up with PHPs craziness.

Why? For just the reason you pointed out - the vast majority of websites don't get enough traffic to make the language matter. I'd imagine that things like learning how to configure apache and/or a caching tool like memcached would handle most of the performance bottleneck on a site that did get that level of traffic.

Seriously - if a language is "fast" enough to allow the creation of responsive GUI apps, it's "fast" enough for web-apps.

Post reply on HN