QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Sat 11th October 2008, 8:35am)
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Java would probably be even slower than PHP. Whenever I go to a website with a java applet, if it is really complex it slows my computer way down.
Server side Java is nothing like client-side java. The slowness you're experiencing is due to your browser launching a JVM inside the browser. Server side Java doesn't have this problem; the JVM is already running in the server and all you get is the same HTML you'd get from the PHP app -- it's just generated that much faster. A properly implemented Java webapp will run rings around a PHP app.
MediaWiki runs 25% faster just by running it within Quercus, which is pretty much just a PHP interpreter written in Java. A full reimplementation in Java would be 50% to 75% faster.
I doubt that a Ruby on Rails implementation would be that much faster as RoR is, like PHP, a fully interpreted language (although the odds are that the RoR interpreter is more efficient than PHP, as PHP's is just about the worst-performing interpreter there is in common use). Java is at least compiled to JVM code. The only way to get faster than that would be to go to a fully compiled language like C or C++.