Comparison of Speed of LiveCode with PHP

[Andre Garzia]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your testing!

I think we're approaching this performance issue wrong. Most webapps will
be I/O bound and not CPU bound. Calculations are not the most common thing
going on but I/O in the sense of reading and writing from database and
files are. Also the only way to deal with structured data in memory in a
straight forward way is LiveCode multilevel arrays but there is no built-in
way to serialize these arrays for consumption outside of LiveCode. For
example, a common thing these days is to have your client-side HTML5 code
calling back your server-side code for more information which is normally
presented in JSON but LiveCode has no built-in function for JSON encoding
and decoding, so both operations happen in pure transcript (or whatever
they are calling it these days) which will make it really slow.

If we want LiveCode to have better performance we need ways to improve I/O.
Things that would be good and have a real impact out of the box:

- JSON and XML encode and decode functions in the engine.
- Non-blocking DB routines


A different issue is scalability. Right now, LiveCode Server works in CGI
mode which is very straight forward but it is not the most scalable thing
under the sun. When I say scale, I am not saying things such as serving
5.000 users. Serving a couple thousand users is easy. I am saying serving
some hundred thousand users with complex server side logic, afterall doing
100.000 hello worlds is easy.

PHP is going thru lots of revolutions in the form of the Facebook
initiatives such as "hack" (new PHP variation), that VM they created and
the little compiler they created which I forgot the name. The PHP
developers are also pushing PHPNG and other gizmos. Even current generation
PHP is not usually server with CGI technology.

Ruby, Node, Python, Clojure, Java, none are served with CGI. Most of them
could be used as CGI but no one is using them this way. CGI is easy but it
is not scalable. Imagine that if you were serving 10.000 concurrent
requests on your little server farm, you're have a collection of 10.000
LiveCode server processes between your servers.

What we need is something like Python WSGI or a non-blocking engine such as
Node. Then we could with a simple pool of couple LiveCode engine instances
serve a lot of people.

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 1:33 AM, Peter W A Wood <peterwawood at gmail.com>
wrote:

> In a previous email Richard Gaskin, the LiveCode Community Manager, wrote
> "Given the role of memory and performance for scaling, if we want to see LC
> Server taken seriously as a professional server tool we need to identify
> and eliminate any significant performance difference between it and PHP.”
>
> I thought that it would be worth spending a little time to compare the
> speed of LiveCode against the speed of PHP. I came up with a test based
> loosely on Carl Sassenrath’s Rebol Speed Script (
> http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r?view=0506 ). I have found it a useful
> base for writing comparative scripts (either comparing languages on a
> single machine or comparing machines using a single language). It is far
> from perfect in a multi-tasking environment but I believe provides decent
> comparative data.
>
> I have attached two scripts, speedtest.lc and speedtest.php. I’m sure
> that both could be improved significantly and welcome such improvements.
> The results of running the two scripts on my machine, LiveCode 7.0.0-rc-3
> and PHP 5.5.14 are:
>
> Schulz:LiveCodeServer peter$ ./speedtest.lc
> LiveCode Speed Test Started
> The CPU test took:             2851 ms
> The Memory test took:       3656 ms
> The File System test took:  1975 ms
> LiveCode Speed Test Finished
>
> Schulz:LiveCodeServer peter$ ./speedtest.php
> PHP Speed Test Started
> The CPU test took:              3921 ms
> The Memory test took:       1200 ms
> The File System test took:  666 ms
> PHP Speed Test Finished
>
> So it seems the LiveCode has the edge on PHP when it comes to calculations
> but not on memory access or file access.
>
> The memory test relies on using arrays, I'm not sure if that is the best
> way to test memory access.
>
> Regards
>
> Peter
>
> Speedtest.lc
>
> #!livecode
>
> if the platform = "MacOS" then
>   set the outputLineEndings to "lf"
> end if
>
> put "LiveCode Speed Test Started" & return
>
> ##cpu test
> put the millisecs into tStart
> repeat with i = 1 to 10000000
>   put sqrt(exp(i)) into tTemp
> end repeat
> put the millisecs into tEnd
> put "The CPU test took:        " && tEnd - tStart && "ms" & return
>
> ##Memory Access
> put the millisecs into tStart
> repeat with i = 1 to 1000000
>   put random(255) into tMem[i]
> end repeat
> put the millisecs into tEnd
> put "The Memory test took:     " && tEnd - tStart && "ms" & return
>
> ##Filesystem
> open file "test.tmp"
> put the millisecs into tStart
> repeat with i = 1 to 100000
>   write "This is a test of the write speed" && random(255) to file
> "test.tmp"
>   read from file "test.tmp" for 1 line
> end repeat
> put the millisecs into tEnd
> put "The File System test took:" && tEnd - tStart && "ms" & return
> delete file "test.tmp"
>
> ##Finish
> put "LiveCode Speed Test Finished" & return
>
> Speedtest.php
>
> #!/usr/bin/php
>
> <?php
>
> print "PHP Speed Test Started\n";
>
> //cpu test
> $start = microtime(true);
> for( $i = 0; $i < 10000000; $i++ ) {
>   $temp = sqrt(exp($i));
> }
> $end = microtime(true);
> $time = ($end - $start) * 1000 + 0.5;
> printf("The CPU test took:         %5.0f ms\n", $time);
>
> //Memory Access
> $start = microtime(true);
> for( $i = 0; $i < 1000000; $i++ ) {
>   $mem[i] = rand(0, 255);
> }
> $end = microtime(true);
> $time = ($end - $start) * 1000 + 0.5;
> printf("The Memory test took:      %5.0f ms\n", $time);
>
> //Filesystem
> $file = fopen("test.tmp", "w+");
> $start = microtime(true);
> for( $i = 0; $i < 100000; $i++ ) {
>   rewind($file);
>   fwrite($file, "This is a test of the write speed".rand(0,255));
>   fread($file, 34);
> }
> $end = microtime(true);
> $time = ($end - $start) * 1000 + 0.5;
> printf("The File System test took: %5.0f ms\n", $time);
> unlink("test.tmp");
>
> //Finish
> print "PHP Speed Test Finished\n";
>
> ?>
>
>
>
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