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Monday, January 22, 2018
Floating Point Benchmark: PHP Language Added
I have posted an update to my trigonometry-intense floating point benchmark which adds PHP to the list of languages in which the benchmark is implemented. A new release of the benchmark collection including PHP is now available for downloading. PHP is a brutal hack of a language created by bashing together HTML and a bastardised flavour of Perl which is just enough like Perl to trick you into thinking you know it, only to pull the rug out from under you whenever you become complacent. PHP is the foundation of vast snowdrifts of incomprehensible spaghetti code which adorns many Web sites, and has been the wellspring of innumerable security holes in those sites. PHP was originally created in 1994 and to this day has no formal specification: the language is defined by the implementation of the interpreter. I wouldn't let PHP anywhere near my own www.fourmilab.ch Web site, but I have to deal with it in mantaining a WordPress-based site I help to administer. Having been forced to wallow with the pig, I decided to add PHP to the list of FBENCH languages. The implementation is a relatively straightforward port of the Perl version of the program, modified to be embedded within a Web page and adapted to the differences between Perl and PHP in handling things such as variable scope in functions, declaration (or non-declaration) of variables, and the structure of arrays. As the reference, I started with the C version, compiled with GCC 5.4.0, and run for 166,051,660 iterations. Run times in seconds were (296.89, 296.37, 296.29, 296.76, 296.37) for a mean time of 296.536, or 1.7858 microseconds per iteration. I then made five timing runs on the same machine, using the PHP command line interpreter version 7.0.22. I ran the benchmark for 32,952,075 iterations, having calculated that number from a previous timing run to yield a run time of around five minutes. The timings in seconds were (295.320, 295.135, 297.174, 296.037, 297.098) for a mean of 296.153 seconds or 8.9874 microseconds per iteration. Comparing the two measurements of time per iteration, PHP is thus 5.033 times slower than C. Interestingly, this is much faster than Perl, which usually benchmarks more than twenty times slower than C. I then verified that the same Web page can be run on a Web server with PHP. Since the machine on which I ran the test had a different type of CPU than the development machine on which I made the timing tests above, I did not compare execution time. Notes on Running the Benchmark The benchmark is supplied as thefbench.php file. This is a Web
page, compliant with the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard, with PHP
embedded to implement the benchmark. It can be run either from
the command line using the PHP interpreter, or by installing it
on a Web site which supports PHP. The iteration count defaults
to 100000. You can specify the iteration count when running
from the command line as the first argument, for example:
php fbench.php 250000 >fbench.html
to run 250000 iterations and write the resulting HTML in the
file fbench.html, which may then be viewed with a Web browser
using a "file:" URL.
If you install fbench.php on a Web server with PHP, you can run
it and specify the iteration count with a URL like:
http://www.example.com/path/to/fbench.php?iterations=250000
In this case your Web browser will directly display the results
of the benchmark.
The benchmark program displays the result of the last iteration
of the computation, reports any discrepancies from the reference
results, and reports the timing, both in seconds elapsed and
microseconds per iterations. Timing is done using the PHP
microtime(true) function, which reports wall clock time in
seconds and microseconds. Archival runs should be done on an
idle system with the iteration count adjusted to produce a run
time around five minutes. (When running from a Web server, you
may have to reduce the run time to avoid having the request time
out.)
The relative performance of the various language implementations (with C taken as 1) is as follows. All language implementations of the benchmark listed below produced identical results to the last (11th) decimal place.
| Language | Relative Time |
Details |
|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | GCC 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| JavaScript | 0.372 0.424 1.334 1.378 1.386 1.495 |
Mozilla Firefox 55.0.2, Linux Safari 11.0, MacOS X Brave 0.18.36, Linux Google Chrome 61.0.3163.91, Linux Chromium 60.0.3112.113, Linux Node.js v6.11.3, Linux |
| Chapel | 0.528 0.0314 |
Chapel 1.16.0, -fast, Linux Parallel, 64 threads |
| Visual Basic .NET | 0.866 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| C++ | 0.939 0.964 31.00 189.7 499.9 |
G++ 5.4.0, -O3,
Linux, double long double (80 bit) __float128 (128 bit) MPFR (128 bit) MPFR (512 bit) |
| Modula-2 | 0.941 | GNU Modula-2 gm2-1.6.4 -O3, Linux |
| FORTRAN | 1.008 | GNU Fortran (g77) 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Pascal | 1.027 1.077 |
Free Pascal 2.2.0 -O3, Linux GNU Pascal 2.1 (GCC 2.95.2) -O3, Linux |
| Swift | 1.054 | Swift 3.0.1, -O, Linux |
| Rust | 1.077 | Rust 0.13.0, --release, Linux |
| Java | 1.121 | Sun JDK 1.5.0_04-b05, Linux |
| Visual Basic 6 | 1.132 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| Haskell | 1.223 | GHC 7.4.1-O2 -funbox-strict-fields, Linux |
| Scala | 1.263 | Scala 2.12.3, OpenJDK 9, Linux |
| FreeBASIC | 1.306 | FreeBASIC 1.05.0, Linux |
| Ada | 1.401 | GNAT/GCC 3.4.4 -O3, Linux |
| Go | 1.481 | Go version go1.1.1 linux/amd64, Linux |
| Julia | 1.501 | Julia version 0.6.1 64-bit -O2 --check-bounds=no, Linux |
| Simula | 2.099 | GNU Cim 5.1, GCC 4.8.1 -O2, Linux |
| Lua | 2.515 22.7 |
LuaJIT 2.0.3, Linux Lua 5.2.3, Linux |
| Python | 2.633 30.0 |
PyPy 2.2.1 (Python 2.7.3), Linux Python 2.7.6, Linux |
| Erlang | 3.663 9.335 |
Erlang/OTP 17, emulator 6.0, HiPE [native, {hipe, [o3]}] Byte code (BEAM), Linux |
| ALGOL 60 | 3.951 | MARST 2.7, GCC 4.8.1 -O3, Linux |
| PHP | 5.033 | PHP (cli) 7.0.22, Linux |
| PL/I | 5.667 | Iron Spring PL/I 0.9.9b beta, Linux |
| Lisp | 7.41 19.8 |
GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Compiled, Linux GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Interpreted |
| Smalltalk | 7.59 | GNU Smalltalk 2.3.5, Linux |
| Ruby | 7.832 | Ruby 2.4.2p198, Linux |
| Forth | 9.92 | Gforth 0.7.0, Linux |
| Prolog | 11.72 5.747 |
SWI-Prolog 7.6.0-rc2, Linux GNU Prolog 1.4.4, Linux, (limited iterations) |
| COBOL | 12.5 46.3 |
Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2010, Windows 7 Fixed decimal instead of computational-2 |
| Algol 68 | 15.2 | Algol 68 Genie 2.4.1 -O3, Linux |
| Perl | 23.6 | Perl v5.8.0, Linux |
| BASICA/GW-BASIC | 53.42 | Bas 2.4, Linux |
| QBasic | 148.3 | MS-DOS QBasic 1.1, Windows XP Console |
| Mathematica | 391.6 | Mathematica 10.3.1.0, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspbian |
Posted at January 22, 2018 15:59