Case Study: CppCMS benchmarks vs Java, C#, PHP
Introduction
Long time ago I had posted a benchmarks comparing CppCMS based blog and PHP based one.
I wanted to compare real life applications with each other. For a long time I had been searching for similar applications in several technologies doing very similar jobs in leading technologies: PHP, Asp.Net and Java/JSP. The last two were particularly important as they use static type system and "compiled" languages as C# and Java that are known to be faster then other dynamic typed languages like PHP, Python, Ruby and Perl popular in web development.
Setup
Unfortunately I had failed to find such application, so finally I decided to write something representative and small on my own an application with following requirements:
- Uses simple time-out based page caching
- Uses MySQL and the database and keeps open connections in pool.
- For each request access to database (if page is not cached), fetches the page content and comments for "sample article" in blog.
- Converts text to HTML using a markdown filter and displays it on page.
I used following technologies:
CppCMS:
Version: 0.99.3
MySQL Connection: dbixx/libdbi library using libmysqlclient
Markdown library: discount
Connection: internal HTTP serverPHP
Version: 5.2.6
MySQL Connection: internal driver
Markdown library: PHP-Makrdown
Connection: Lighttpd 1.4.19 + FastCGI
Bytecode Cache: XCacheAsp.Net/Mono
Version: 2.6.7
MySQL Connection: Connector/Net
Markdown library: MarkdownSharp
Connection: internal HTTP server XSP (found to be much faster than fastcgi server)JSP/Tomcat
Version - Tomcat: 6.0.18
Version - Java: Sun Java 1.6.0_12
MySQL Connection: Connector/J
Markdown library: jmd-0.8.1
Caching: oscache 2.4.1
Connection: HTTP
I tested following parameters:
- Pages per seconds generation for different cache hit/miss ratio: stating from 0% miss ratio up to 100% miss ratio.
- Memory usage
For each test the application was "warmed up" with 100 requests to fill the cache, and then 1000 request with max concurrency of 5 request are done, while certain percent of them is new pages and the other are taken from "warmed up" once.
Notes:
I used the fastest Markdown implementation I had found.
C# implementation is the same one that http://stackoverflow.com uses - it is actually heavily optimized implementation based on older C# implementation
The Java implementation is based on the above C# and the fastest one I had found.
Discount is the fastest C implementation of markdown that I had found.
Results:
Summary
- C#, Java and PHP implementation behave very similarly and without significant differences.
- The memory usage of Java/Tomcat and Mono/Asp.Net was significantly higher - up one or two orders of magnitude in comparison to CppCMS and PHP
- Surprisingly PHP behaves very well, in comparison to "compiled" languages like Java and C#.
Revisiting
After doing some profiling it was clear that C implementation of Markdown was significantly faster then all other implementations. So I decided to create my own mini-markdown that make some basic handing of titles, lists, paragraphs and quotes at one level only. That is very simple syntax but implemented similarly in all 4 languages using same algorithm.
The results were following:
The difference between CppCMS and other implementations was still significant but still much smaller then the difference between real markdown implementation. So the performance difference was less dramatic.
2nd Revision
And in the last revision I decided not to use any text filters by fetch ready HTML formatted content from DB and display it on the web as is.
Such comparison actually profile the most basic stuff:
- Caching
- SQL Connection
- Request/Response handling
And would ignore hundreds lines of code used in any web applications responsible for the actual business logic.
Conclusions
- Using C++ with CppCMS provides significant performance gains in developing web applications even in very basic case.
- The performance is effected not only by the framework itself but also by many other libraries that are in use. Using highly optimized C and C++ libraries may give significant performance gain in many cases.
- Such called "jit-compiled" languages as C# and Java and the frameworks based on the use significant amount of memory and still provide much lower performance then the one that can be achieved using real compiled languages like C++.
- It is good to remember that these benchmarks are still quite synthetic ones and in real life the actual performance depend on many factors - but using high quality and high performance libraries available for C++ have significant impact on performance.
Results Data
Markdown --------- Miss % CppCMS Mono PHP JSP/Tomcat 0 3200.73 747.164 974.142 821.887 1 2891.2 427.727 724.173 337.736 2 2734.69 300.017 544.162 257.44 5 2285.95 162.686 301.507 130.023 10 1749.14 89.4447 174.724 68.5387 20 1247.86 47.7347 93.7919 25.7081 50 642.769 19.8311 38.979 15.1298 100 356.968 9.77116 20.1892 7.96328 Mini-Markdown --------- Miss % CppCMS Mono PHP JSP/Tomcat 0 3103.14 763.222 1152.63 744.72 1 2933.97 728.971 1076.38 765.599 2 2944.42 726.338 1016.42 724.869 5 2804.44 661.613 866.32 822.927 10 2592.99 584.725 705.465 753.218 20 2239.03 471.576 507.021 674.488 50 1625.5 309.443 274.962 374.26 100 1156.09 197.123 159.974 164.515 HTML ----- Miss % CppCMS Mono PHP JSP/Tomcat 0 3286.51 849.849 1147.21 808.038 1 3055.53 776.305 1137.35 748.829 2 2991.02 691.502 1122.88 693.439 5 2687.84 693.257 1074.22 756.618 10 2390.12 615.311 1016.27 604.452 20 1886.69 521.467 917.225 668.23 50 1947.93 346.672 669.693 289.656
System and Hardware
- OS: Linux, Debian Lenny, 64 bit
- Hardware: AMD Athlon XP 3000, 64 bit, 1GB memory
Related:
Code
The Code can be downloaded from there. note, to run it you will need to have some libraries installed and configure some hardcoded paths to make it run.
