I like the comparison Erik Wrenholt has made. Via a simple fractal program, you can evaluate the pure performance of different programs.

Since it's a bit outdated, I've re-execute it with last version of Python, Lua, Ruby, PHP and Haskell:

• Haskell ghc-6.4.2: 2sec
• PHP-5.1.6: 2.48sec*
• Python-2.4.3: 2.65sec
• Python-2.5: 2.78sec
• Lua-5.1: 3.4sec**
• Ruby-1.8.5: 10.18sec

* I'm using microtime() instead of time()
**I'm using os.clock() instead of os.time()

All those tests was done 5x on a Windows XP(Hurrgg sorry) machine with a 2-GHz Pentium M 760 and 1GB of RAM

UPDATE:

Based on a comment about psyco, here the result of the the script simply by adding:

import psyco
psyco.full()

at the top the script.

• python-2.4 + psyco 1.5.1: 0.37sec!!!

Same machine, same configuration, same methodology to make the test