This time we will focus on the startup time. The process start time is important if your processes are not persistent. If you are using FastCGI, mod_perl, mod_php, or mod_python, then these statistics are not so important to you. However, if you are spawning many processes which do something small and live for a very short time, then you should consider the CPU resources which get wasted while the script interpreter is being initialized.

The benchmarked scripts do only one thing – say “Hello, world” on the standard output. They do not include any additional modules in their source code – this may, or may not be your use-case. Though, very often the scripting languages have pretty many built-in functions, and for simple tasks you never need to include other modules.

Here are the benchmark results:

Language	CPU time			Slower than
	User	System	Total	C++	previous
C++ (with or w/o optimization)	2.568	3.536	6.051	–	–
Perl	12.561	6.096	18.723	209%	209%
PHP (w/o php.ini)	20.473	13.877	34.918	477%	86%
Python	27.014	11.881	39.318	550%	13%
Python + Psyco	32.986	14.845	48.132	695%	22%

The clear winner among the script languages this time is… Perl. 🙂

All scripts were invoked 3000 times using the following Bash loop:

time ( i=3000 ; while [ “$i” -gt 0 ]; do $CMD >/dev/null ; i=$(($i-1)); done )

All tests were done on a Kubuntu Lucid box. The versions of the used software packages follow:

• g++ (GNU project C and C++ compiler) 4.4.3
• Python 2.6.5
• Python Psyco 1.6 (1ubuntu2)
• Perl 5.10.1
• PHP 5.3.2 (1ubuntu4.2 with Suhosin-Patch), Zend Engine 2.3.0

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The C++ implementation follows, click “show source” below to see the full source:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
	cout << "Hello, world!\n";
	return 0;
}

The Perl implementation follows, click “show source” below to see the full source:

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Hello, world!\n";

The PHP implementation follows, click “show source” below to see the full source:

<?php
echo "Hello, world!\n";

The Python implementation follows, click “show source” below to see the full source:

#import psyco
#psyco.full()

print 'Hello, world!'

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Update (Jan/14/2012): Copied the used test environment info here.