Is there any performance comparison between Perl web frameworks?

Question

I have seen mentions (which sounded like unsubstantiated opinions, and dated ones at that) that Embperl is the fastest Perl web framework.

I was wondering if there's a consensus on the relative speed of the major stable Perl web frameworks, or ideally, some sort of fact-based performance comparisons between implementations of the same sample webapps, or individual functionalities (e.g. session handling or form data processing), etc...?

UPDATE: This question is specifically about the speed comparison of different frameworks, executing identical/equivalent tasks. I appreciate the good intentions, but I already know that speed is not the only criteria I should be looking at. I wasn't asking for philosophical advice. And believe it or not, being frameworks, you CAN actually compare their speed on an apple-to-apple basis by running identically purposed tasks/code/apps on them (e.g. render a given form with a given set of templated inserts etc...), even if the full functionality of each framework is not 100% the same.

Answer 1

I don't want to go into the interpretation discussion (for most real world scenarios these overheads have no impact at all) - but here are my tests:

1. Pure Plack

zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ cat app.psgi 

sub {
   my ( $env ) = @_;
   return [
       200,
       [ 'Content-Type' => 'text/text' ],
       [ 'Hello World' ]
       ];
}
zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ plackup
HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections at http://0:5000/

With simple ab -n 10000 I get

Requests per second: 2168.05 [#/sec] (mean)

2. Dancer

zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ cat dancer.pl 
 #!/usr/bin/perl
           use Dancer;

           get '/' => sub {
               return "Why, hello there";
           };

           dance;
zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ perl dancer.pl 
>> Dancer server 1950 listening on http://0.0.0.0:3000
== Entering the development dance floor ...

With similar ab test I get Requests per second: 1570.49 [#/sec] (mean)

3. Mojolicious::Lite

zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ cat mojo.pl 
 # Using Mojolicious::Lite will enable "strict" and "warnings"
    use Mojolicious::Lite;

    # Route with placeholder
    get '/' => sub {
        my $self = shift;
        $self->render(text => "Hello!");
    };

    # Start the Mojolicious command system
    app->start;
zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ perl mojo.pl daemon
Sat Jan 22 20:37:01 2011 info Mojo::Server::Daemon:320 [2315]: Server listening (http://*:3000)
Server available at http://*:3000.

Result: Requests per second: 763.72 [#/sec] (mean)

4. Catalyst.

Unfortunately the code is much too long to be presented here in its entirety, but the Root controller contains:

sub index :Path :Args(0) {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;

    # Hello World
    $c->response->body( 'Hello World' );
}

The result is:

Requests per second: 727.93 [#/sec] (mean)

5. WebNano

zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ cat webnano.psgi

{
    package MyApp;
    use base 'WebNano';
    1;
}

{
    package MyApp::Controller;
    use base 'WebNano::Controller';

    sub index_action {
        my $self = shift;
        return 'This is my home';
    }
    1;
}    
MyApp->new()->psgi_callback;
zby@zby:~/progs/bench$ plackup webnano.psgi 
HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections at http://0:5000/

And the result:

Requests per second: 1884.54 [#/sec] (mean)

This will change after some more features are added.

Answer 2

Here is one comparison between perl frameworks, in terms of speed (startup) and memory consumed by framework itself. It is a bit old (2008), so it does not compare new stuff like Plack.

http://mark.stosberg.com/blog/2008/11/startup-benchmarks-for-mojo-catalyst-titanium-httpengine-and-cgiapplication.html