Question

I am creating a small web service which will only be accessed by machines, not users that simply takes a query string and makes a few MySQL queries. I decided to code this in PHP because it is simple and easy to write and does its job well. My boss however, wants we to write it as a CGI in C (using FastCGI) because he says it will be faster and use less memory. I’m not so keen on this idea for a few reasons:

• The MySQL API for C seems to have a lot more calls than the equivalent PHP and need a lot more error handling.
• String manipulation in C is somewhat complicated and messy.
• The code in C is almost 3 times as long as the equivalent code in PHP and looks rather messy, with lots of error handling.

But that’s just my opinion. What other factors do I need to take in to account? Is C the best tool for this job? Or is PHP?

Answer 1

Some points about this:

• It’s much easier to implement any web
  service in PHP rather than C, because
  PHP is a language designed to work
  online and C is a general language.
• C is compiled and this makes it much faster than PHP programs, but if you are really worried about optimization (your program consumes a lot of resources and your hardware is very limited) you can use PHP “accelerators” that compiles the source (for example)
• Access to databases is equal penalized in both languages, so if your program has to access a lot to DB, it will have a similar performance.
• The more important: the boss is the boss 🙂