Techempower Web Framework Benchmarks Round 10

Reading thru these tests they are measuring database performance as much as framework performance.

They are also single node which is great if you're entire system is only going to ever need one machine's worth of capacity (Eg: vertical scaling)

I've been working with this project for a while, here's some unorganized thoughts:

   1) Statistics
   2) Running Overhead
   3) Travis-CI
   4) Memory/Bandwidth/Other info
   5) Windows
   6) IRC
   7) Ease of Contributing

1) Currently, the TFB results are not statistically sound in any sense - for each round you're looking at one data point. EC2 has higher variability in performance, so that one data point is worth less than the bare metal data point. Re-running this round, I would expect to see at least 5 to 10% difference for each framework permutation. See point (2) to understand why we're not yet running 30 iterations and averaging (or something similar)

2) Running a benchmark "round" takes >24 hours, and still (sadly) a nontrivial amount of manpower. It's currently really tough to do lots of previews before an official round, and therefore tough to let framework contributors "optimize" their frameworks iteratively. I'm working on continuous benchmarking over at https://github.com/hamiltont/webjuice - it's a bit early for PRs, but open an issue if you want to chat

3) As you can imagine, our resource usage on Travis-CI is much higher than other open source projects. They have been nothing but amazing, and even reached out to chat about mutual solutions to potentially reduce our usage. Really great team

4) We do record a lot of this using the dstat tool. dstat outputs a huge amount of data, and no one has sent in a PR to help us aggregate that data into something easy to visualize. If you want this info, it's available in the results github in raw form.

5) Sadly windows support is struggling at the minute. We need something setup like Travis-CI but for our Windows system. CUrrently windows PRs have to be manually tested, and few of the contributors have either a) time to do it manually in a responsive manner or b) windows setups (a few do, but many of us dont). Any takers to help set something up? FYI, we have put a ton of work into keeping Mono support just so we can at least test that changes to C# tests at least run and pass verification, but naturally that isn't as nice as really having native windows support

6) join us on freenode at #techempower-fwbm - it's really fun meeting the brilliant people behind the frameworks

7) If I had to pick one big thing that's happened in between R9 and R10, it would be the drastically reduced barrier to entry. Running these benchmarks requires configuring three computers, which is much harder than something like pip install. Adding vagrant support that can setup a development environment in one command, or deploy to a benchmarking-ready AWS EC2 environment, has really reduced the barrier to getting involved. Adding Travis-CI made it better - it will automatically verify that your changes check out! Adding documentation at https://frameworkbenchmarks.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Projec... made it even easier. Having a stable IRC community is even better! Tons of changes have added to mean that it's now easier than ever for someone to get involved

PHP frameworks generally rely on heavy amounts of caching at every level (database, bytecode, Varnish, etc) to make up for this.

Why this is the status quo is something I also question.

It’d be interesting to see on Nano too.

My experience has been that JRuby 9k is slightly slower than MRI in a number of cases right now, mostly because its IR has been completely rewritten, and is still pending a performance pass.

That said, it's still a huge step up from the 1.7 series, and once the team starts knocking out performance problems it should be pretty magnificent.