The latest installment in our PHP performance series takes a look at the open source APC module, which is described this way: "APC is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code." The results were dramatic, as the module increased the user capacity of the reference PHP application by 2.8 times.
The performance of our reference PHP application under load (a default SugarCRM installation) showed a 140% increase, measured by total system capacity, after installation of the Zend Platform.
The performance of our reference application under load (a default SugarCRM installation) on a virtualized server showed a 14% decrease, measured by total system capacity, compared to the same system running natively on equivalent hardware.
Read the reportThis article measures the performance impact of the Zend Optimizer on a real-world processor-bound PHP application (SugarCRM) under load. Our measure of performance is user capacity. We define that as the number of simultaneous users that the system can support while meeting the specified performance criteria. The performance critera for this test require that all pages load within 6 seconds and no errors are encountered in the application.
On June 11th, Apple released a Windows beta version of its OSX web browser, Safari 3.0, claiming its the "fastest browser on Windows". The claims were based on the results Apple found while running the iBench benchmark from Ziff Davis, with separate measurements for HTML, JavaScript performance, and application start time. While benchmarks are invaluable for performance evaluation, we set out to see if those claims would make a difference in actual browser usage.
Virtualization is hot. Over the past few months, it would be difficult to pick an IT magazine out of my stack that does not have an article on Virtualization. Even in our small company, we have two VMware servers. This allowed us to reduce 9 underutilized servers down to two physical machines. Because the original severs were severely underutilized, the virtualized servers actually perform better (running on newer hardware). They are easier to manage - especially for backups. We have reduced the risk of configuration changes, software installs and upgrades by taking snapshots before these procedures. What's not to like?
In this report the same tests as part one are re-run, this time with no memory limitation showing a marked increase in Tomcat performance on Linux over Windows.
Read the reportBeing a performance company, we are always interested in the impact of new development techniques on the performance of web applications. We have numerous customers who have performance problems due primarily to the size of their web pages. Put another way - the pages are simply too big to achieve the desired performance goals with the available bandwidth. In some cases, the page consists primarily of content that is common between many pages. For instance, a header, footer and navigation menu that change infrequently, if at all, during the use of the application. This suggested that if the application was only updating the part of the page that needed to change, a considerable amount of bandwidth could be saved.
Read the reportThis first part of this article measures performance information in order to distinguish the differences evident between the Windows® and Linux platforms. We find that given comparable hardware the performance differences introduced are almost trivial. When the server was pressed to capacity, our Windows installation was forced turn away some traffic with minimal alteration in serviced performance, whereas our Linux installation elected to service nearly all connections at the cost of introducing latency. However, prior to reaching capacity, our Linux server appeared on average to be capable of servicing connections at a slightly faster rate than our Windows server.
Read the reportThe standardization of the application server, thanks to Sun's J2EE specifications, has spawned a wealth of implementations. There are offerings from big players such as Sun, IBM, BEA and Oracle as well as numerous offerings from low-cost vendors and the open-source community.
Like most developers, I participate in a number of technical forums and mailing lists. A recurring topic on servlet-development forums is “Which J2EE server should I use for my servlet-based application?” There are a number of criteria for selecting a server: ease of installation, quality of documentation, reliability, cost and performance. Some of these aspects are readily apparent to the evaluator; but performance seems to generate a lot of discussion with a notable lack of facts. After a quick search, I was surprised that few usable benchmarks have been published comparing the servlet performance of the popular low-cost servers.
Read the report
