Linux Blog

One thing that is for certain is that some people like performance. Running an operating system like Linux gives you choices right out of the box for scripting. This blog post will show the differences in times between Bash, PHP and Perl.

Basically what I have done is created three scripts, one in each language. Then I run them with the time tool to test out the execution time.

Here are the results of echoing 1-100000 out to /dev/null for each script:

BASH:
 
real    0m1.966s
user    0m1.664s
sys     0m0.072s
 
PHP:
 
real    0m0.309s
user    0m0.220s
sys     0m0.048s
 
Perl:
 
real    0m0.126s
user    0m0.096s
sys     0m0.000s

You can clearly see out of this the order of performance by this test is Perl, PHP and then BASH. Now, what is interesting is when I run the script to stdout these are the results:

BASH:
 
real    0m8.689s
user    0m2.408s
sys     0m0.416s
 
PHP:
 
real    0m4.381s
user    0m0.544s
sys     0m0.372s
 
Perl:
 
real    0m3.938s
user    0m0.244s
sys     0m0.324s

Bash takes about twice as long as Perl / PHP to complete the exact same task. The winner of this test is Perl but I’ll be doing more tests over time when I become more familiar with Perl