How fast is Comanche?

The other day I came across this guy who wants to serve webpages in less than a millisecond. Without parallelization. So, his web page is really simple, it looks like this: <h1>Hello TWUG!</h1>.

His point is that things like Twitter are difficult to scale across several machines. The slowness of dynamic pages, he claims, is tried to be made up by advanced caching strategies. He goes on to check how fast certain languages are at serving dynamic content. He gets these numbers:


Clearly, his machine is faster than mine, because serving the same file statically, my Apache (single-threaded using httpd -X) can do only 1850 requests per second, that is 0.5 ms per request. (I use this benchmark: httperf --hog --num-conn 10000 --uri http://localhost:9090/?name=Niko). Here are the numbers I get:


Anyway, I find interesting to mention that Comanche is not far from Apache. Comanche can serve the same page dynamically (the name is a GET parameter) in 1.1 ms, for which Apache takes statically 0.5 ms. As for Apache-php vs. Comanche, I'd call it a tie.

The Squeak code for the Http server would be this:

ma := ModuleAssembly core.
ma addPlug: [:request | HttpResponse fromString: 
   (String streamContents: [:s| 
   s nextPutAll:'<h1>Hello! '; 
   nextPutAll:( request  fields at: 'name'); 
   nextPutAll: '</h1>']).].
(HttpService startOn: 9090 named: 'Example') module: ma rootModule

By this way, as the above snippet suggests, a standard Seaside installation for Squeak is quite able to make RESTful applications. Just avoid the Seaside framework and plug right into the Comanche web server.

For completeness, the PHP-code:

<h1>Hello <?=$_REQUEST['name']?></h1>

Update

By the way, this seems to be about 10 % faster:

s:=(HttpService on: 8080 named: 'Example Http Service').
s onRequestDo: [ :request |
 HttpResponse fromString: 
  (String streamContents: [:s| s nextPutAll:'<h1>Hello! '; 
  nextPutAll:( request  fields at: 'name'); 
  nextPutAll: '</h1>']) ].
s start