Why is ASP so SLOW?! [modified]
-
It's because IIS is driven by hamsters, while Apache is driven by gerbils. The gerbils run slightly faster than the hamsters but they wear out more quickly. That's why Apache has so many plug-in modules - it saves the server administrator from having to replace so many gerbils all the time.
Please don't bother me... I'm hacking right now. Don't look at me like that - doesn't anybody remember what "hacking" really means? :sigh:
-
asp and aspx are two totally different things.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "also I don't think "TranslateOneToTwoBillion OneHundredAndFortySevenMillion FourHundredAndEightyThreeThousand SixHundredAndFortySeven()" is a very good choice for a function name" - SpacixOne ( offering help to someone who really needed it ) ( spaces added for the benefit of people running at < 1280x1024 )
Christian Graus wrote:
asp and aspx are two totally different things.
Too true! I've developed similar applications in ASP and .Net, and I find .Net to be much quicker. Plus, you can pre-compile all of the code so that it runs even faster. ASP didn't offer that. I can't offer up anything solid when it comes to PHP vs. ASP and .Net, but I think it might be true that the PHP sites are sometimes lower traffic sites. I wonder if there's any true analysis of such things... As an aside/related item, last night I moved all of my databases on my production server to a different disk drive than the web services uses. I'm thinking that this will make things faster since each request of the server will have some activity from one drive and some from the other instead of everything having to come from one drive.
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
I think to do a comparison, you would need to set very specific methods/functions etc.. to compare against. Forum software "P" vs. forum software "A" is not a good comparison. Compare feature sets, ease of use, management behind the scenes, server platforms, hardware, network etc.. are all factors that have to be considered. I would suggest writing a few pieces of code in both languages, (*illion loops) for string concats, parsing etc.. DB calls and updates using both MSSQL and MySQL for both platforms. Put each technology/app under equal server under a load, then execute. Then you could get some idea of which is faster/slower and more reliable. I can't say if classic ASP is slower or faster compared to PHP, but I highly doubt PHP would be faster then any compiled language. Even high traffic sites that are written in PHP, or any language for that matter, usually implement a high level of caching either using a service like Akamai, or storing cache on their systems. By doing this, the pages served as basically static html/XML content, which takes no time to spit out. I've coded and used PHP, ASP and VB/C.Net. I'll admit I've coded some very ugly stuff in all of these languages, usually when I first started to pick them up, but can say from my experience, .Net has been very solid and very fast. I have three very large sites I work on/responsible for, and traffic on each is about 2 million PV's per day. Two of them are written in .Net, one is split between PHP and .Net, the reason for the split was that mission critical features and functionality that were written in PHP could not keep up with the load. Eventually, it too will be completely rewritten in .Net. My 2 cents.
-
I've worked on some *fast* ASP.NET[^] sites, so it isn't a technological limitation. ASP.NET and PHP are targeted at two different types of developers. ASP.NET development is targeted at developers that just want to drop a bunch of controls on a form and have VS and the compiler work it's magic and poof you have a web site. They typically don't care that it takes a bunch of viewstate and extra page loads to make it happen. Plus to write fast ASP.NET code you have to limit the number of controls you use on a page, again something that goes against the form designer approach. I haven't used PHP, but I'm betting you are forced to deal with HTML and http requests more directly with less overhead. You end up having to do the same with ASP.NET if you care about performance and scalability, but it's rarely essential.
This blanket smells like ham
First of all, plenty of BIG site are written in PHP. Ever heard of Wikipedia? The programmer is definitely of importance - the more code bloat you have the slower things will run. I recently converted a customer's site from PostNuke (an open-source PHP CMS) to my own PHP CMS - and saw load times improve by an order of magnitude! Nuke had way more features than they needed, so it was very slow - sometimes taking over 1200 ms to respond when a link was clicked. My CMS, on the other hand, is stripped to the bare essentials - the core runtime code is a single 1200-line file. It typically responds between 120 and 200 ms. While not quite as fast as raw, unscripted HTML - about 80 ms, it is a vast improvement. (In my experiments, an empty PHP file takes 30-50 ms longer to process than an empty HTML file due to the fact that my host runs PHP as a CGI, so a separate process needs to be spawned. This means that my CMS took about 40 ms to actually run.)
-
Christian Graus wrote:
asp and aspx are two totally different things.
sure because remember, not matter where you go, there you are.
led mike
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
As many others have already stated, it is difficult to compare ASP(X) with PHP or any other technical platform without a consistent standard. If one were able to develop a PHP and ASPX website with exactly the same architecture and running on identical hardware the ASPX variant would perform better because there is no JIT compilation (I'm assuming the ASPX website would be precompiled of course). Even this scenario is unfair because ASPX runs with IIS and PHP generally runs with Apache. In the end, the architecture of the application's code coupled with the capabilities of the hardware it is running on will determine it's overall performance potential. Add to the mix the web delivery platform (IIS, WebSphere, Apache, etc.), the database provider (SQL Server 2000/2005, MySQL, Oracle), operating system (Windows Server, Unix, Linux, Solaris) and clustering options, you can see that direct comparisons are impossible, there are simply too many variables to account for.
-
First of all, plenty of BIG site are written in PHP. Ever heard of Wikipedia? The programmer is definitely of importance - the more code bloat you have the slower things will run. I recently converted a customer's site from PostNuke (an open-source PHP CMS) to my own PHP CMS - and saw load times improve by an order of magnitude! Nuke had way more features than they needed, so it was very slow - sometimes taking over 1200 ms to respond when a link was clicked. My CMS, on the other hand, is stripped to the bare essentials - the core runtime code is a single 1200-line file. It typically responds between 120 and 200 ms. While not quite as fast as raw, unscripted HTML - about 80 ms, it is a vast improvement. (In my experiments, an empty PHP file takes 30-50 ms longer to process than an empty HTML file due to the fact that my host runs PHP as a CGI, so a separate process needs to be spawned. This means that my CMS took about 40 ms to actually run.)
I never said there weren't any big PHP sites, so get that chip off your shoulder. All I said was that ASP.NET has a fast engine, but buried it under a bunch of designer crap. PHP not so much from what I understand.
This blanket smells like ham
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
nalorin, I agree with very little being said here. Especially trying to claim only large sites mostly are using ASP and J2EE. That's a crock. Also I disagree with the "experienced coders" thing. Statistics will take care of experienced coders eventually getting a shot at a lot of sites. Even if what I said is not true, then the less experienced coders will interact with the wizards online and learn the techniques. The parameters for site speed are: 1) Capitalization of the web site. More money there then they probably have the money for bandwidth and powerful computers. Also maybe, though not definitely, experienced programmers. 2) Number of coders on the project. If there is one, then that person will not have the time to fix all slowdowns caused by software. 3) Are the coders full time or doing it in their spare time. This is extremely important. The whole impetus behind open source software. If you have a lot of part time coders then things get done. 4) Traffic at the site. Mostly this impacts the Database and bandwidth numbers. The software and servers normally can handle a high load. However the retrieving of data and storing is a relation of RAM in the computer and disk speed. MySQL and PostgreSQL can and do handle high loads. Several of the gigantic sites use MySQL. 5) Volume of data on the site. More data to wade through (in the db) the slower it can become unless hardware or you break up the database and place it on different disks, etc... So answering your question, I would say your anecdotal review of sites is incomplete. I do not believe the language plays a huge part is the speed of the site. MS probably runs ASP and their site is fairly fast. The slowdowns on their site are due to volume of traffic and volume of data that they serve.
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
I don't know Code Project seems fairly snappy ;) It is hard to compare sites. Perhaps the code quality isn't the same. Perhaps asp sites tend to use more eye candy. Perhaps it is the whole stack (asp = windows server and likely IIS, where as PHP might be on a *NIX box and Apache).
-
I never said there weren't any big PHP sites, so get that chip off your shoulder. All I said was that ASP.NET has a fast engine, but buried it under a bunch of designer crap. PHP not so much from what I understand.
This blanket smells like ham
You didn't, but a few other posters earlier in the thread claimed that PHP isn't really used for large sites and is thus incomparable with ASP. Good point about the drag-n-drop 'programmers' though. It's possible that the poor design/implementation resulting from that approach is what causes the performance issues, not the underlying interpreter/compiler/server implementation.
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
One thing to consider, especially with forums is that the two leading commercial PHP forum software packages out there are very mature. Much more mature than any forum software I've seen done in classic ASP or ASP.NET.
-
You didn't, but a few other posters earlier in the thread claimed that PHP isn't really used for large sites and is thus incomparable with ASP. Good point about the drag-n-drop 'programmers' though. It's possible that the poor design/implementation resulting from that approach is what causes the performance issues, not the underlying interpreter/compiler/server implementation.
Considering that when ASP.NET launched Microsoft basically said, that they optimized the product for cranking out small 200 or so user websites as quickly as possible, not the lean and mean case where performance is essential, that's likely to be the case. ;P There is a high performance web platform buried under there, you just have to jettison a bunch of crap to get down to it.
This blanket smells like ham
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
I think a key differentiator is the experience and knowledge level of the coder. IMHO, ASP is a an easier language to learn and use compared to php. Therefore, you have allot more entry level programmers, many of who may not have any formal training, writing an application. After all, everybody's kid can write a website right? Same thing applies to SQL Server and Oracle. SQL Server makes it so much easier to create databases, write views, etc compared to Oracle that you have a lower floor for the knowledge required to use SQL Server. The problem is just because one can create a database or a website in a doesn't mean they created a well designed and thought out application. I just find that the knowledge level of those working in php and Oracle is ofter much greater then those working in ASP(X) and SQL Server.
-
I think a key differentiator is the experience and knowledge level of the coder. IMHO, ASP is a an easier language to learn and use compared to php. Therefore, you have allot more entry level programmers, many of who may not have any formal training, writing an application. After all, everybody's kid can write a website right? Same thing applies to SQL Server and Oracle. SQL Server makes it so much easier to create databases, write views, etc compared to Oracle that you have a lower floor for the knowledge required to use SQL Server. The problem is just because one can create a database or a website in a doesn't mean they created a well designed and thought out application. I just find that the knowledge level of those working in php and Oracle is ofter much greater then those working in ASP(X) and SQL Server.
Yes, agreed, and agree with others saying this and that it seems it's an issue of ASP.NET giving so much in features but you need to be mindful of the extra stuff that comes along that you should consider stripping out or tweaking. The work seems to be in paring out the bloat that is not needed. As others mentioned, the viewstate is an issue. I haven't seen mentioned the judicious use of server controls vs an html control wherein quickly grabbing a server control during development when an html one would be fine will cause now, that control to be compiled on the server even though you may never do any coding against it - it doesn't need to do be dynamic (like a label for instance). Also haven't seen mentioned the judicious use of caching by the developer where they should take into account the real need for up to the second data being presented to the user each time, from the database. For example, in a dropdown list of colors to choose, how often will that list change in the database, so why not set a long cache time on it. All in all it seems like it's due to judicious use of the developer of all the features and controls and wire ups they have at their disposal.
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
This is a really good question and I am disappointed that going through the threads I just find weird denials without addressing the question. ASP may or may not be slower than PHP. It is completely valid to compare them as they are both options in setting up a site, and the choice is fundamental to what kind of server you want to set up. I don't really know as I switched from asp to php a while back because of the bugginess of frontpage extensions, and the solid reliability of apache. Apache can go down and php sites can break, but it is usually understandable user error. With iis/frontpage, trying to follow the codes it would add in and debugging officially undocumented quirks drove me nuts. Apache/PHP is still at a programming language level, but it seems much more straight-forward than trying to get IIS/Frontpage to behave. In short, I don't know and I thought it was a good question. Saying you can't compare them or that it is all in the coder is being ignorant that there are differences between the two and it is good to know what performs better for what.
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
The argument of a asp.net site's traffic level being inversely proportional to the site's performace (ie, the higher the traffic, the slower it 'feels') has been mentioned a few times in this thread already. ... But there's also another thing to consider -- unless you change the default setting in IIS, it will actually unload your asp.net site from the server's application pool after 'x' minutes of site inactivity. So the next time someone comes to your asp.net site, it will take a little extra time to load as it starts up the process again. Some less-frequented sites suffer from slow 1st load time because of this. Long time lurker; first post; please be kind!
-
I just had an interesting question. I've used many websites, being a child of the internet. And, in all my days of surfing, I've found that, in general, PHP-driven sites generally take less time to load than ASP sites. I've found that in about 4/5 cases (particularly with forums), sites that are obviously ASP-driven (you can see the .asp(x) extension in the URLs) often take several seconds longer to load than similar pages that are obviously PHP-driven. Any suggestions on why this seems to be? (I'm not saying ASP /IS/ slower... just that it /seems/ slower - my answer to my own question would be "Microsoft", which should explain everything, but I want the nitty gritty details!)
modified on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:33 PM
Your question is not interesting at all. There is more than one factor involved in a web app, other than the platform (being .NET, PHP, Java, Perl and so on). Application and database design and implementation greatly affect application performance. Furthermore, you have to look at the hardware other environmental factors. :confused:
-
This is a really good question and I am disappointed that going through the threads I just find weird denials without addressing the question. ASP may or may not be slower than PHP. It is completely valid to compare them as they are both options in setting up a site, and the choice is fundamental to what kind of server you want to set up. I don't really know as I switched from asp to php a while back because of the bugginess of frontpage extensions, and the solid reliability of apache. Apache can go down and php sites can break, but it is usually understandable user error. With iis/frontpage, trying to follow the codes it would add in and debugging officially undocumented quirks drove me nuts. Apache/PHP is still at a programming language level, but it seems much more straight-forward than trying to get IIS/Frontpage to behave. In short, I don't know and I thought it was a good question. Saying you can't compare them or that it is all in the coder is being ignorant that there are differences between the two and it is good to know what performs better for what.
I totally disagree with you on this. The programmer ultimately has more control over how a site performs then any other factor. I've seem some very poorly designed PHP sites that were slow, and I've seen poorly designed ASP(X) sites that were slow. I've also seen some wickedly fast php and asp(x) sites that do basically the same thing as the poorly designed sites, they just do it a ton faster and more efficiently. The biggest difference is still the skill level of the programmer, not the language because they are all pretty solid right now. ASP tends to have a ton more entry level programmers, guys who come from a different background then say, Computer Programming. I happen to be one of those guys, I came from an engineering (chemical) background that used to tons of VBA work in Excel and from there transitioned into the web. Some of my first work as an ASP programmer was HORRIBLE, but remember I had no training, etc. I didn't understand the importance of things like garbage collection, caching, etc. My knowledge of DBs consisted of using access, so the concepts of configuring the indexes, etc was completely foreign to me. I don't know of a single php programmer that came from a non computer background. Sure, there are some out there, but on the norm, there are many more non-computer based asp(x) programmers as compared to php. I don't care how fast a language or server is, if the programmer doesn't have a clue and writes horrible code the application will be slow.
-
nalorin wrote:
I suppose the experience of the coder plays a huge part ^_^
it plays a HUGE part! anyone not experienced can totally screw up any and every language known to man. :-D
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Maybe you will remember this one El Corazon, when we were discussing ridiculous code. It is the Quadrasort. This is code written on a platform that can achieve decent speed, but the design is so bad that the algorithm will be slower than the slowest scripting languages in achieving results. See it at: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The\_Quadrasort.aspx (hey, an ASP page, let's see how fast it loads) "anyone not experienced can totally screw up any and every language known to man" (El Corazon) This seems to support that claim, as does George Bush's use of English. ;)