Hi everyone,

I am considering adopting Zend_Translate to replace an in-house PHP translation engine, but was bewildered by the wide choice of translation backends. To weed out the chaff, I ran a performance test of various back-ends. I thought others might be interested in the results, so I am posting them here.

The method was as follows:
- A vmware server running a standard install of Zend Core 2.5
- A generate script to create translation files containing 10.000 items
- A speed test script that loaded and echoed 1000 translations from these files.

I ran this speed test script through the microsoft web app stress tool, for a single-threaded run-time of 30 seconds (warm-up time of 5 seconds), and got the following mean time to last byte (in milliseconds):
- Direct array lookup: 36.54
- Zend_Translate + Array: 61.30
- Zend_Translate + CSV: 189.97
- Zend_Translate + Gettext: 446.15
- Zend_Translate + TMX: 1966.20

In the attachment you will find the generate and test scripts.

My conclusions from this are:
- Zend_Translate's overhead is very reasonable (I will be adopting it).
- CSV offers a good trade-off between convenience of translation and performance.
- TMX is stupendously slow (as expected).
- Gettext is surprisingly slow, given that it is recommended so often. I duplicated this test just to double-check, but the results are accurate.

I didn't test Xliff, because I assumed the performance would be comparable to TMX.

Feedback? Suggestions?

Attached Files

translate speedtest.zip (73.5 KB, 3 views)