Net Vs. PHP Speed
ASP.NET and PHP are two popular server-side programming languages, meaning they perform functions on a website's server before a page is sent to a user's browser. While PHP is open-source and free to use, the competing ASP.NET was developed by Microsoft as part of the .NET framework and is proprietary. It's impossible to definitively say that one language is faster than the other, but each has certain strengths and weaknesses pertaining to their speeds.
Other People Are Reading
-
ASP.NET: A Compiled Language
-
ASP.NET is a compiled programming language. This means that before any program executes, it must "compile" all the code into a non-editable executable program. Generally, compiled code runs notably faster than non-compiled code. ASP, ASP.NET's predecessor, didn't run compiled code, and ASP.NET specifically made the change to improve performance. Programmers don't need to manually compile ASP.NET code; the code is automatically compiled the first time the page is loaded, which means the first person to load a newly-edited page will experience a brief delay while the code compiles.
PHP: An Interpreted Language
-
PHP is an interpreted programming language. This means that instead of code being compiled into an executable program before running, the code is "interpreted" line-by-line by special software every single time it runs. Since the interpretation happens every time the PHP code is requested, interpreted languages tend to execute slower than compiled languages.
-
HTML Formulation
-
Though it's compiled rather than interpreted, some factors work to ASP.NET's disadvantage. One of them is the way in which ASP.NET formulates HTML code. ASP.NET allows programmers to use server controls that manually generate HTML code output, but the output tends to be overwritten and not nearly as lean as HTML that a programmer would write by hand. If used excessively, the inefficient HTML that ASP.NET generates can result in slowdown. PHP, for its part, doesn't offer the ability to automatically generate HTML.
JavaScript Libraries
-
JavaScript libraries are bundles of JavaScript code that make performing complex JavaScript functions easier. Some JavaScript libraries are commonly used in conjunction with PHP, such as jQuery and Prototype, while the AJAX framework is usually the library used with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX is generally considered bulkier and less efficient than other libraries; it's a few times the size of jQuery, for example.
Clean Code
-
It's a common programming truism that there is more than one way to accomplish anything. Good programmers will write standards-compliant code in as lean a manner as possible, and two programs written by two different programmers that accomplish the same thing will almost never look the same. Therefore, the speed of either ASP.NET or PHP programs ultimately depends on how well the programs are written.
-
References
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of the mad LOLscientist
