scripting language performance issues

[Sean Blakey]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2000 qoppi at my-deja.com wrote:

> i've done some rudimentary testing using wcat to
> view performance differences between scripting
> languages for a set of pages ( vbscript, jscript,
> python,perlscript). Initial results indicate that
> using vbscript as the server side scripting
> language consistently results in more pages being
> served by the webserver...has anyone else had a
> similar experience?
> 
> 
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> 
It's been a long time since I worked with ASP (six months in the QA
department at Chili!Soft), so I am a bit rusty.

As I remember, using any scripting language other than VBScript requires
the use of the "@ Language=" directive.  With the current version of ASP
at the time, only one @ directive was allowed per page, giving a decided
advantage to VBScript as an ASP language.

We noticed the same performance hit on IIS and PWS whenever the "@Language
directive" was used.

My guess is that the ASP engine loads the VBScript engine by default for
every script (perhaps even keeping the VBScript loaded continuously).
When the ASP engine hits an "@language" directive, that script will have a
performance hit as the ActiveX scripting engine is invoked.

Try explicitly setting the language to VBScript in all the VBScript
scripts you are using for the performance tests.  If you can find a way to
change the default language the ASP server uses, do so and see how that
affects performance.

Sean Blakey
(206)297-7123
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