In almost every situation, time is of the essence these days; people spend hundreds of dollars per year on fast food, risk speeding tickets to arrive at their destinations five minutes early, and buy special machines so that they can fast-forward through commercials.  So ASP.NET pros should be happy to see proof that their favorite Web application framework is quick.

Joe Stagner, who’s a Senior Program Manager in Microsoft’s Developer Tools and Platform Group, recently ran (on his own time) a comparison pitting ASP.NET against PHP.  He made the contest as fair as he could, using the same machine for all tests and recording and publishing some detailed data sets.

If you feel like looking over Stagner’s results spreadsheet, it is in fact available here.

But to cut to the chase, he concluded, “ASP.NET is universally faster than PHP (on Windows and on Linux) with the exceptions of File Copy and Attribute operations.”

Stagner also wrote, “ASP.NET (C#) operations, object use, library calls, etc. are SIGNIFICANTLY faster that the PHP equivalents.”

Since Stagner tried so hard to be impartial, the ASP.NET camp should take these findings as a real victory of sorts.  And assuming you can find the time, we hope you have fun celebrating.