While running some benchmarks on some of the more popular PHP frameworks, Paul Jones came across something interesting - a PHP request was handled faster than a static HTML request.

With the help of the great guys at Slicehost.com, I am attempting to run my benchmark series on a virtual private server, to compare with EC2. However, I’m seeing a very strange result for the baselines: a PHP page delivers more requests-per-second than a static HTML page.

According to his results, his runs of ab (the Apache benchmarking tool) showed that requests against the index.html file (versus the index.php) came in at almost 400 requests per second slower. As it turns out, though, the problem of the skewed results wasn't in the serving up of the requests but in the ab tool itself. He picked up another testing tool, seige, and ran that with the same requests and got more correct results.