Performance Evaluation of Back-end Web Application Programming Languages

Abstract

There are many programming languages that can be used for back-end web development. Numerous aspects of the project could be affected by the choice of a language. Because of that, the question about the most suitable programming language for a given web application arises. One of the main aims of this paper is to quantitatively compare 4 programming languages that could be used for back-end software development: Java, Kotlin, PHP and Python. Execution time, RAM usage, and CPU usage were selected as evaluation criteria. In order to be able to compare them, in all 4 given languages an application with the same functionality was created. The measurements were performed in an isolated environment for a different number of requests and different realistic scenarios. From the results it could be concluded that Java and Kotlin have in general better execution time in comparison with PHP and Python, especially with a larger number of requests; Python has the smallest usage of CPU while the other 3 languages have similar usage; the usage of RAM in Python and PHP is significantly smaller than Kotlin and Java.