Question

I was wondering if ASP.NET is more efficent than PHP with sockets. Ive frozen a server several times doing relatively few connections on PHP. I was wondering if any server side programming engines are capable of hosting a reliable and efficient socket server.

Answer 1

Having never implemented a socket server in PHP, nor ever touching ASP.NET I can’t comment on those.

I’ve seen many great socket applications implemented in Python. I recommend looking into Twisted.

I’ve personally played around with EventMachine (Ruby), and it’s definitely a great little library to use. Their goal is:

Extremely high scalability, performance and stability for the most demanding production environments

Creating a server with EventMachine is as simple as:

require 'rubygems'
require 'eventmachine'

module Echo
  def receive_data data
    send_data data
  end
end

EM.run {
  EM.start_server "0.0.0.0", 10000, Echo
}

You should be able to benchmark this pretty easily. It’s a simple echo server.