Overview

Performance and scalability are major challenges that must be taken into account in many web projects over time. This paper provides an overview of the two well-known back-end technologies PHP and Node.js. This paper explains the differences and similarities between the two back-end technologies and compares them in particular with regard to the parameter "performance". This is made possible by testing two web applications with the same functionalities against each other. The first web application is implemented in "Node.js" and runs on a "Node" server. The second web application is implemented in the most popular back-end programming language, PHP, and runs on two different web servers, one on an Apache server and the other on an Nginx server. The aim is to compare these three running websites using different tools in order to determine which programming language performs better with which server environment.