New on the L2Admin.com site today is the first part of a series they're doing comparing three of the popular server-side scripting languages for web development - PHP, Perl and Python - and what benefits each can give.

For a very long time I have wondered if there were any real benefits between Perl, PHP or Python from a performance standpoint [...] So after much wondering I have decided to answer the question for myself once and for all. I am going to perform three tests that I think typify the use cases for all three languages, I am also going to code the same tests in C and in static HTML.

This first post shoes the results from the most basic of tests - a "hello world" that's echoed out to the page. He ran the tests with Apache's ab tool for 10,000 times and recorded the request per second, average request time and the overhead as compared to plain HTML. It's interesting to see the jump from the HTML baselines when the languages start getting involved with the stock PHP install coming in as the slowest of the group.