PHP Code Generator benchmarks

Over the past week, we took a few minutes to do some performance tests and compare how the latest version of POG fares against its predecessor. So without further adue, here’s a brief summary of the results:

Hardware:
P4-HT 3.0GHz
512MB RAM
Linux 2.6.14 SMP
PHP 5.1.2 – statically built with MySQL and PDO
MySQL 4.1.16

Description:
Each test consisted of performing CRUD operations with 3000 objects, each made up of 21 attributes. The attributes were of various types including VARCHAR, DECIMAL, MEDIUMTEXT, INT and DATETIME.

The tests were performed several times, alternating between the different configurations to improve precision. In between each test, the MySQL database was reset to the original conditions. The average time taken to CREATE, RETRIEVE, UPDATE and DELETE the 3000 objects was then calculated for each condition.

The configurations tested were:

1. Using POG 1.6 + POG Wrapper
2. Using POG 1.6 + PDO Wrapper
3. Using POG 1.5 + PDO Wrapper

Results:

The results obtained were partially surprising. As suspected, they show that POG 1.6 is faster than 1.5. The factors contributing to this performance boost are smaller and cleaner PHP classes and partial addition of preprocessing to determine which attributes need to be escaped/unescaped at the code generation level instead of at run-time.

However, the fact that POG + PDO runs consistently slower than POG + POG wrapper was quite surprising. Since PDO is compiled within PHP as a core module, we expected it to be faster than using an external database wrapper. We suspect it has something to do with either MySQL not properly caching the prepare statements in between queries or the way we compiled PHP with PDO, although we highly doubt it.

In any case, the benchmarks were essentially done to get a rough feel of how we’re doing in terms of performance as we move forward, and it seems we’re going in the right direction.