M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: 

-snip-
> The raw numbers that went into this are from the Alioth shootout 
> page, and what I *haven't* done is checked out which versions of
> Perl, Python, YARV, Ruby, jRuby and PHP these tests used. They 
> could be years old or they could have been run yesterday morning. :) 
> I discarded all the tests for which there were any missing values. 

Perl v5.8.8
Python 2.5.1
Ruby 1.9.0 (2007-08-14 patchlevel 0) [i686-linux]
Ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i686-linux]
Ruby 1.8.5 (2007-06-07 rev 3841) [i386-jruby1.0]
PHP 5.2.2-pl1-gentoo (cli)

You haven't mentioned how many remained after you discarded those with
missing values: at least 7 discards - Ruby 1.9.0 has 5, PHP another
one, JRuby another one. Did you actually include "hello world"?


-snip-
> Now suppose your boss comes to you, as bosses do, and says,
> "well, all them high-falutin' box plots are dandy, but the board
> of directors wants one number for each language!" It turns out 
> (and I'll let Google and Wikipedia fill in the blanks for you) 
> that the one number you want to give your boss, aside from your 
> cell phone number, is the *geometric mean* of all the benchmark
> ratios. Again, smaller is better. 


geometric mean (of ratios to most performant program):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all


-snip-
> It's pretty clear to me from these numbers is that the only 
> reason that deploying web applications on the LAMP stack and its
> cousins using PostgreSQL, Perl, Python and Ruby is economically 
> viable is that they spend most of their time either in the database
> or on the network.

As in - "we have found that the CPU time is rarely the limiting factor;
the expressibility of the language means that most programs are small
and spend most of their time in I/O and native run-time code."

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/miscfile.php?file=benchmarking&title=Flawed%20Benchmarks


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