> PHP sucks, but there are a ton of profitable companies that use it because it is wicked wicked fast. In my mind, that makes it suck less. :-)
I think in this mini benchmark, it's not so much that "PHP" is fast (as a language, it isn't, really), rather that Ruby + its various frameworks are pretty pokey.
In any case though, while I remain a Ruby fan, the grandparent sort of misses the point: by being more efficient, you have a wider range of things that can make you money. If you have to have a huge amount of resources to get some pages up, doing ads or some other low-margin activity might not even be feasible like it would with a faster solution.
You're actually on to my point which is to stop doing low margin activities and focus on high margin activities. Low margin activities are where writing a page in C / C++ might be a really good idea. The performance critical parts of your site can always be rewritten in assembler if need be.
If your margin on a page request is 5% your business is probably fucked anyway (unless your serving billions of pageviews per month, there are only a few sites that work on this business model). I'd much rather have a business with orders of magnitude fewer requests and a profit margin on the order of 10s of thousands per page request.
What do you think 37Signals margin on a page request for basecamp is? My guess is at least 10,000%.
"You're actually on to my point which is to stop doing low margin activities and focus on high margin activities."
That's something I would certainly endorse. I didn't get that out of your post, I completely agree. Engineers who start companies often overlook this fact and focus on the entirely wrong set of problems when building their business.
I think in this mini benchmark, it's not so much that "PHP" is fast (as a language, it isn't, really), rather that Ruby + its various frameworks are pretty pokey.
In any case though, while I remain a Ruby fan, the grandparent sort of misses the point: by being more efficient, you have a wider range of things that can make you money. If you have to have a huge amount of resources to get some pages up, doing ads or some other low-margin activity might not even be feasible like it would with a faster solution.