Question

What Server Side Programming Language, which without a single doubt is THE FASTEST to output a file content? (I am looking at ~20k file hits / second, so YES it does matter if certain X Language can output a file 1ms faster then PHP).

Because PHP was my language of choice, I have read the following links before I posted this question (but suddenly it raised a question, which server side programming language that is faster than PHP?)

http://raditha.com/wiki/Readfile_vs_include

When you state your answer, please also tell me the method that is used to read file. So dont just say FASTCGI/PHP, but also the method used to read the file, such as in this case readfile();

Answer 1

(I am looking at ~20k file hits / second , that is why i have totally abandoned the idea to use apache at all, and i really dont want my poor choice of Server Side Programming Language actually slow down the file output , so YES it does matter if certain X Language can output a file 1ms faster then PHP )

The thing is, are all of those 20k hits/second going to be requiring generation of the file? That seems unlikely. After the first generation of a static file, you can just configure nginx to cache it, so all of the requests after that will hit the cached version and never invoke your server-side language at all.

I also need a server side script to check if this file existed or not

That’s the point of having a proxy cache like nginx there in the first place.

So are you sure you’re really chasing the right problem here? The numbers you should be giving us are not how many hits you expect per second, but rather how many cache misses you expect per second. After all, if you’re serving, say, 600 files that change once every minute, that’s only going to be on the order of 10 cache misses per second, which is a much more manageable number for the actual server-side program to handle (and makes the choice of language less of an issue).

So, do tell us more: what’s your cache hit/miss rate going to be like? A 10% cache miss rate is a lot different than a 1% cache miss rate, and so on.