Brad Wood talks about “How is CFML speed vs other languages? (Hint: really fast!)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

"...It is freaking awesome to see CFML (both Lucee and Adobe) blowing the pants off other popular web frameworks. I think this sort of head-to-head comparison is great information to use when defending CFML as a battle-tested production server..."

Show notes

Why compare language performance?

It is freaking awesome is it to see CFML (both Lucee and Adobe) blowing the pants off other popular web frameworks. I think this sort of head-to-head comparison is great information to use when defending CFML as a battle-tested production server. (results and tests below).

Other ways to compare programming languages

Modern development ecosystem

Tools

IDEs

Libraries and frameworks

Modern language

Ease of coding (writing and reading)

Ease of learning

Connection to other systems and APIs

Manufacturer and community there for the long term + support

Ease of hiring

App reliability

Scalability

Security

Fashion / what is hot / new

What are the TechEmpower performance benchmarks that you used in your testing?

The benchmarks have a suite of tests, such as run 20 queries on a page and output some data, and every language and framework implements the same logic in their syntax and style. The tests literally take days to run in full and spin up each combination of language and framework in docker containers where they are hammered with oodles of traffic and then the juicy stats are recorded for sweet graphical comparisons.

Since 2012 in EC2, now in Docker containers. Open source.

The site is basically information overload. There’s just dozens and dozens of combinations of languages, frameworks, databases, web servers, etc-- and many of them are crazy fast micro frameworks you’ve never heard of which are pretty cool. You can apply a huge list of filters to try and carve down the list of frameworks to a useful size of equivalent ones.

See results

Not all the test results are the same. Play around with the site to compare your favorite languages and see how they hold up in the simple hello world tests vs the heavy lifting DB tests. I’ve stacked the cards a bit in my selections above, but I think it’s more indicative of a real world web app if we’re honest.

What languages did you compare?

Brad added the following to the site a year or so ago:

Raw Lucee server

Raw Adobe ColdFusion server

ColdBox MVC running on Lucee

ColdBox MVC running on Adobe ColdFusion

All the famous languages: CF, PHP, Python, Go, RoR, Grails etc

What about front ends such as React, Angular, Vue?

What about Java (SpringBoot), WP, dotNot, Cloture

Size of CF Docker image

Doesn’t matter for this test

May matter for clustered Docker solutions with orchestration

How did CFML perform?

Let me be the first to say Brad’s filters are pretty arbitrary. CFML does better on more complex pages with more queries than other languages. That’s because it’s got a little more overhead for a simple Hello World request (we’re talking ms here) but it’s JVM concurrency and datasource connection pooling really shine on a more complex test. As such, the link and screenshot above is for the “Data Updates” test

Languages compared:

Go is very fast. This is no surprise as Go is designed to be as small as possible and even discourages use of frameworks all together. I couldn’t get the filter to only show one of the Go configurations, but you can see it’s the only language that was as fast or faster than CFML in this test!

CFML basically came in second place out of the selected languages and frameworks. Raw CFML is faster than ColdBox as expected but it’s not a massive difference.

Node.js came in slower than both raw CFML and ColdBox MVC

Groovy (Grails) came in slower than both raw CFML and ColdBox MVC