Speed of PHP vs JavaScript?

Question

I am writing a script to tokenize file contents. I've written a tokenizer in JavaScript, but it gets pretty slow with large files (5+ seconds). Since I'm retrieving the files from the server anyways, I am considering rewriting it in PHP to shave off a few seconds. I've read that the speed difference between PHP and JavaScript is negligible, but if the files are 1mb or bigger, a small speed difference could add up. I found this benchmark online, but I'm not sure if the info is up-to-date (with all the JS engine optimizations from the past couple years).

Porting over all my code would take some work, so if I can help it, I won't use PHP. But if its going to be much faster (25-30%), it would be worth it.

Answer 1

Well, like you alluded, JavaScript is executed on the client side, so it would depend on the client. For example, a client on an iPAD wouldn't be able to run those Quake3 HTML5s as smoothly as a client running on a gaming machine. PHP on the other hand runs on the server.

In general, JS is faster considerably than PHP though (on the same hardware);

Here are some [hard figures][1] of tests between the two, to back up my assertion. [JS (query) vs PHP][2] Performance.

[1]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/php.html [2]: jQuery vs. PHP - Performance Comparison

Answer 2

I just converted a script from PHP to Javascript and I have greatly increased performance.

Javascript seems much faster in mathematical calculations. I have personally witnessed the performance improvement, my PHP procedure in some cases also employed a few seconds of running, while the same procedure written in javascript takes at most a few milliseconds.

Although Javascript to be known as client-side language I run my code on the server side thanks to Node.js