PHP vs Node.js scraping

bench.js

/*
$ npm install request
$ node bench.js
*/

var request = require('request');
var url = 'http://www.google.com';
var total_requests = 100;

var i;
var counter = 0;
var start = +new Date();
for (i=0; i<total_requests; i++) {
  request(url, function (error, response, body) {
    if (error) {
      console.log("error :(");
    } else {
      console.log(response.statusCode);
    }
    if (++counter == total_requests) {
      var end = +new Date();
      console.log(i +", "+(end-start)/1000);
    }
  });
}

bench.php

<?php

/*
$ git clone https://github.com/amphp/artax.git
$ cd artax
$ composer install
$ php bench.php
*/

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

use Amp\Artax\Client;

const URI = 'http://www.google.com';
const MAX_SOCKETS = 5; // <-- Same as node's default (fairness!)
const TOTAL_REQUESTS = 100;

function onUpdate($data, $i) {
    if ($data[0] === Amp\Artax\Notify::RESPONSE) {
        echo "{$i} | ", $data[1]->getStatus(), "\n";
    }
}

$startedAt = microtime(1);
$client = new Client;
$client->setOption(Client::OP_HOST_CONNECTION_LIMIT, MAX_SOCKETS);

for ($i=0; $i<TOTAL_REQUESTS; $i++) {
    $promises[] = $promise = $client->request(URI);
    $promise->watch(function($data) use ($i) { onUpdate($data, $i); });
}

$responses = Amp\wait(Amp\all($promises));
var_dump(microtime(1) - $startedAt);

@raitucarp Ask and you shall receive 😀

Good old fashioned garbage residential internet:

I now get redirected to captchas when trying to query google more than a couple of times in succession (imagine that) ... so instead I re-ran the same benchmark in the code posted above but used the encrypted https://github.com as the target URI. Equivalent results:

uri = https://github.com

|=====|========|=========|======|
| run |   PHP  |   NODE  | reqs |
|=====|========|=========|======|
|  0  |  1.404 |  3.461  | 100  |
|  1  |  1.380 |  4.897  | 100  |
|  2  |  1.375 |  4.396  | 100  |
|  3  |  1.498 |  3.378  | 100  |
|  4  |  1.813 |  3.384  | 100  |
|  5  |  1.452 |  3.450  | 100  |
|  6  |  1.380 |  3.445  | 100  |
|  7  |  1.446 |  3.506  | 100  |
|  8  |  1.406 |  4.409  | 100  |
|  9  |  1.455 |  4.855  | 100  |
|=====|========|=========|======|

* results measured in seconds

/cc @mrseth

Would you be able to rerun the benchmark for node with 0.12.0 and io.js 1.5.1 and post the results?

Pretty good internet

UnbrandedTech:~ james$ speedtest-cli 
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Sai gon Postel Corporation (180.93.246.1)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by FPT Telecom (Ho Chi Minh City) [7.56 km]: 4.095 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 40.80 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 44.87 Mbit/s

Results (http://www.example.com)

NodeJS v5.0.0
request@2.67.0

UnbrandedTech:~ james$ node benchmark.js
100, 0.788

PHP 5.6.16 (cli)
amphp/artax 2.0

UnbrandedTech:~ james$ php benchmark.php
float(4.8010399341583)

Node is ~83.6% faster?