Janko in a Jar

I use XML+XSLT instead of MySQL+PHP on 2 of my websites. For some reason I always imagined XSLT is fast. Yesterday I added something made with X+X combination to QUBIDRAW also so I decided to do a small comparison because my “is fast” assumption was based on.. well, nothing.

I made two scripts called tablepush that pushes some tabular data and shape it into html table. One script uses basic mysql functions and then php to do the html shaping:

<?php
$link = mysql_connect('localhost:3307', 'root', 'rootp');

mysql_select_db('mlvsx');

$query = 'SELECT * FROM '.$_GET['data'];
$result = mysql_query($query);

echo "<table>";
while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
    echo "<tr>";
    foreach ($line as $k => $col_value) {
		$tag = '';
		if ($k == 1) $tag = 'strong';
		else if ($k == 2) $tag = 'em';

		$t1 = ''; $t2 = '';
		if ($tag) {
			$t1 = "<$tag>";
			$t2 = "</$tag>";
		}

        echo "<td>{$t1}{$col_value}{$t2}</td>";
    }
    echo "</tr>";
}
echo "</table>";

mysql_free_result($result);
mysql_close($link);
?>

The other loads XML and uses XSLT to turn it to html table:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output method="html" encoding="iso-8859-1" indent="no"/>

	<xsl:template match="things">
		<table>
		<xsl:apply-templates />
		</table>
	</xsl:template> 	

	<xsl:template match="thing">
		<tr>
			<td><xsl:value-of select="@id" /></td>
			<xsl:apply-templates />
		</tr>
	</xsl:template> 	

	<xsl:template match="aaa"><td><strong><xsl:value-of select="." /></strong></td></xsl:template>
	<xsl:template match="bbb"><td><em><xsl:value-of select="." /></em></td></xsl:template>
	<xsl:template match="ccc"><td><xsl:value-of select="." /></td></xsl:template> 	

</xsl:stylesheet>

Results using http_load to do the load test on my local (older) computer are :

Table with 3 rows

my-php : 25 requests / sec
X-X : 49 requests / sec

Table with 50 rows

my-php : 21 requests / sec
X-X : 39 requests / sec

Table with 350 rows

my-php : 11 requests / sec
X-X : 13 requests / sec

So it seems XSLT is quite fast. I will keep using it for the cases where it makes sense (like a lot of discrete data with known and non-frequent relations). It's funny to me that XSLT is in a way quirky and hackish and yet elegant. you can find complete sources and data to do the test here: LAMP XSLT .

It would be interesting to test some other platforms too...

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Just programming, web-dev.