[newbie] Equivalent to PHP?

[Gilles]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:12:55 +0200, Alain Ketterlin
<alain at dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> wrote:
>You misunderstand the problem here. It's not about the duration of the
>actions, it's about the latency it takes to read/parse/execute the
>script. HTTP is stateless anyway, so if the same "interpreter" handles
>several requests, what you save by keeping the interpreter alive is the
>load/parse phase. If you relaunch an interpreter for every HTTP request,
>you pay the same price again and again for something which is not even
>related to your scripts' execution.

Thanks for the input.

But I read that PHP-based heavy-duty web servers compile the scripts
once and keep them in a cache, so they don't have to be
read/parsed/executed with each new query.

In that case, what is the benefit of using a long-running process in
Python?

I enjoy writing scripts in Python much more than PHP, but with so many
sites written in PHP, I need to know what major benefits there are in
choosing Python (or Ruby, ie. not PHP).

Apparently, very few people use Python à la PHP, ie. Python code
embedded in web pages?