PHP versus Java

Here is an intersting tidbit burried in a post about Friendster's switch from Java to PHP. As usual the debate tends to feed on how you build the application rather than the fundamentals of the underlying technologies.

Of particular interest was this quote. in the journal "ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 31 Issue 3" there was an article called "A performance comparison of dynamic Web technologies" where Perl, Java server technolgy (also tomcat) and Perl was benchmarked in a labratory environment. It was concluded that Serverside Java outpreformed PHP and Perl by a factor 8. The abstract also states, In general, our results show that Java server technologies typically outperform both Perl and PHP for dynamic content generation, though performance under overload conditions can be erratic for some implementations.