CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++pythonperformancecpu-speed
David Moreno García
David Moreno García

Reputation: 4523

C++ vs Python server side performance

I've to develop a server that has to make a lot of connections to receive and send small files. The question is if the increment of performance with C++ worth the time to spend on develop the code or if is better to use Python and debug the code time to time to speed it up. Maybe is a little abstract question without giving a number of connections but I don't really know. At least 10,000 connections/minute to update clients status.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4332

Answers (2)

user395760
user395760

Reputation:

With that many connections, your server will be I/O bound. The frequently cited speed differences between languages like C and C++ and languages like Python and (say) Ruby lie in the interpreter and boxing overhead which slow down computation, not in the realm of I/O.

Not only can use make good and reasonably use of concurrency (both via processes and threads, the GIL is released during I/O and thus does not matter much for I/O-bound programs), there is also a wealth of asynchronous servers. In addition, web servers in general have much better Python integration (e.g. mod_wsgi for Apache) than C and C++. This frees you from writing your own server loop, socket management, etc. which you likely won't do as well as the major servers anyway. This is assuming we're talking about a web service, and not something more arcane which Apache etc. cannot do out of the box.

Upvotes: 5

Puppy
Puppy

Reputation: 146988

I'd expect that the server time would be dominated by I/O- network, disk, etc. You'd want to prove that the CPU consumption of the Python program is problematic and that you've grasped all the low-hanging CPU fruit before considering a change.

Upvotes: 2

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