Cheers,
John

Will report back how it goes.

Yes, we can say that but for this particular test case. This simple benchmark is pretty limited — review the second, bold paragraph in the beginning of the article. You need to test further for your particular setup (program algorithms, usage pattern, hardware and OS, etc).

So in this case it’s fair to say that JS in node is 2,5 times faster than Java as JS = 1/2 as fast as C++ and Java = 1/5 as fast?

Would be interesting to see a comparison with Java as well.

Just in case, I did test the PHP benchmark with and without APC enabled, and it made no difference on my computer.

Code optimizers are a different story. In theory they should make the PHP code run faster. This is what Zend claim for their well-known PHP Optimizer which for PHP 5.3 is now called Zend Guard:

Zend Optimizer is a free application that runs the files encoded using Zend Guard and enhances the overall performance of your PHP applications.

My tests however shown no difference in performance. Other tests confirm my results (PHP compiler performance; Impact of Zend Optimizer on PHP Performance).

I’m not really sure though if Zend Guard does the same thing as Zend Optimizer did for PHP 5.2 and older. In PHP 5.2 we had an INI setting for optimization level, for example. With Zend Guard there are almost no settings and it could be that Zend Guard is only to decode Zend encoded PHP scripts. The Zend Server suite has a Zend Optimizer+ component which may be what Zend Optimizer for PHP 5.2 did, but Zend Optimizer+ is not shipped as a separate .so library, so I’m not going to try it.