Performance comparison of middleware architectures for generating dynamic web content

On-line services are making increasing use of dynamically generated Web content. Serving dynamic content is more complex than serving static content. Besides a Web server, it typically involves a server-side application and a database to generate and store the dynamic content. A number of standard mechanisms have evolved to generate dynamic content. We evaluate three specific mechanisms in common use: PHP, Java servlets, and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). These mechanisms represent three different architectures for generating dynamic content. PHP scripts are tied to the Web server and require writing explicit database queries. Java servlets execute in a different process from the Web server, allowing them to be located on a separate machine for better load balancing. The database queries are written explicitly, as in PHP, but in certain circumstances the Java synchronization primitives can be used to perform locking, reducing database lock contention and the amount of communication between servlets and the database. Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) provide several services and facilities. In particular, many of