PHP can perform better than Node.js
My previous post about using Silex and AppServer-in-PHP similarly to ExpressJS generate quite a bit of interest. In the Hacker News thread there was a question about memory usage, and so I put the AppServer under siege. Memory usage stayed constant at:
13958 bergie 20 0 125m 10m 2136 S 1 0.6 0:00.28 php 13959 bergie 20 0 125m 10m 2136 S 1 0.6 0:00.31 php
Then I did the same Siege for the ExpressJS version:
14051 bergie 20 0 615m 12m 4988 S 0 0.7 0:00.34 node
The PHP implementation served 3.80 requests per second, while the Node.js version served 3.79, both on 11" MacBook Air with Ubuntu 11.04.
This trivial example isn't obviously the big test of PHP app serving vs. Node.js, but at least I was surprised that PHP did better than Node here.
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DNode: Make PHP and Node.js talk to each other
If you’ve been following my blog, you might have noticed that lately I’ve started doing quite a lot of Node.js development alongside PHP. Based on conversations I’ve had in various conferences, I’m by far not alone in this situation - using Node.js for real-time functionality, and PHP (or Django, or Rails) for the more traditional CRUD stuff.
Flow-based programming for PHP
You may have seen my earlier post about NoFlo, the flow-based programming tool I’ve written for Node.js. It allows you to do quite cool stuff, like a visually controlled web server: