Performance Evaluation of Programming Languages as API Services for Cloud Environments: A Comparative Study of PHP, Python, Node.js and Golang

Over the past decades, the speed and bandwidth of internet systems have dramatically improved. Alongside this, the expansion of cloud server providers, in terms of both price and efficiency, has paralleled the development of various website, applications and household devices that can be accessed via the internet. The development of API Services to support these various services necessitates several considerations, one of which is the choice of language for API Service development. In this study, we compare the performance of four popular languages used for developing Web services or API Services: PHP, Node.js, Python, and Golang. We experiment three abilities: data querying and transmission, file management, and CPU utilization for computations. The outcomes are measured in terms of response time and CPU usage. Our experiments reveal that when the system has a low number of users, both Node.js and Golang respond well and have similar response times. However, as the number of users in the system increases, Golang responds better than Node.js.