Re: CGI programming

Jon,

First, please accept my apologies for the typo in your name. Second, I
probably should not have responded to your point about programmer
productivity because I lack the bandwidth to discuss that. My main point
was about application performance and how that impacts the cost of computer
operations in addition to the impact on end-user productivity. Since the
performance discussion has splintered, the remainder of my remarks are to
the topic, as opposed to any person.

I should admit that I have a problem with performance claims about
mainstream language environments such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js.
I don't think they are worth the bits that may be required to store them,
let alone the resources required for readers to consume them. Actually,
that problem appears to be the case with so many performance claims.

For example, the claim that SQL compiled in an RPG program runs faster than
that embedded in a PHP script. People should know that PHP doesn't run SQL.
The SQL is sent to a DBMS for processing. A result set is then returned to
PHP.

However, an SQL result set might be returned to a script in JSON format.
Then the processing that may be required to parse JSON into "objects" or
"values", and the logic to map those into output streams intended for
browser consumption might be the thing that takes 25 times more CPU.

Parsers written in C perform better than ones written in Java. Generating
output streams from RPG programs perform better than Java and PHP. Zend
advocates configuring PHP scripts to cache and return the same results for
same queries. That of course doesn't work when databases change.

Notwithstanding, my performance concerns have little to do with native
compiled code vs. scripts. They don't have much to do with "optimization"
tricks.

Rather, my concerns have to do with ARCHITECTURE, which perhaps
unfortunately isn't measurable. But the results of architecture are
manifested by the presence of server farms, and written documents that
delineate hardware requirements of vendors who are selling and supporting
products that are based on mainstream language environments, as opposed to
ones written in RPG. The CPU requirements range from 10-20 times. You can
extrapolate that to the cost of people who configure, optimize, and
maintain server farms. Add to that the loss of productivity of people who
use applications that don't perform well. Add to that the cost of
offloading more and more processing to PCs and mobile devices, just because
their server architecture is laden with latencies.

Nathan.