Question

Money, Staff, Skill and preference to open source or commercial is neutral.

Let’s take the best of the best programmers (for arguments sake) and think about this:

What will perform better overall:

• PHP & MySQL

or

• ASP.Net & SQL Server

(I don’t want biased answers, just looking for performance and speed).

Answer 1

I’m the PHP guy (that also does .NET) that is going to say: All things being equal (programmer skill with the chosen platform, hardware, bandwith, etc.) ASP.NET with SqlServer is going to be faster than PHP with MySQL (at runtime). There is no way in hell an interpreted language can beat a compiled language at runtime speed.

I’d like to coin the question: "does it matter" and I cannot answer that one for you. but in my case, and most i’ve run into the answer was a definate no. I find that usually the difference in raw speed in (well designed) code is negligable, though ofcourse YMMV.

The choice mostly depends on the answer to the question: "when do you want to be fast?"

1. while writing code
2. while running code
3. while debugging code
4. all of the above

The only case where PHP would beat ASP.NET most of the time is 1; while writing code
There are two cases where ASP.NET wins hands down; 2 and 3, running and debugging code.

If you want the fastest overall, The answer will be undefined until we know the time spent in each of 1, 2 and 3 using both platforms.

— addition below —

I obviously forgot to mention that there is one potential big thing that hasn’t been addressed in PHP (yet) but is easy to do in .NET and that is multithreading. You can (with a lot of effort) do some multiprocessing in PHP but .NET makes it easy to run multiple actual threads in one process. If this isn’t a dealbreaker however go for either.