[php] ASP.net vs PHP (What to choose)

I have been assigned a task to develop a new web application. Its a kind of social web applications, for the sake of understanding you can say its similar to facebook. Now before start developing such huge application i have few questions to ask:

• First, Does the tool and programing language affects the performance of web application?

e.g I made two web pages both have same contents over it, the only difference is that one page is made in ASP.net(with C#) and other is made in PHP, now which page opens more fast at user end? The only purpose of asking this question is that i want to choose one language which is more faster from end user prospective

• Same is the case with database do i need to choose some specific database or i can use any database of my choice, currently i am considering:

1.MS SQL Server
2.MY SQL and
3.Postgres

There are a couple of topics that might provide you with an answer. You could also run some tests yourself. Doesn't see too hard to get some loops started and adding a timer to calculate the execution time ;-)

You can have great success and great performance either way. MSDN runs off of ASP.NET so you know it can perform well. PHP runs a lot of the top websites in the world. The same can be said of the databases as well. You really need to choose based upon your skills, the skills of your team, possible specific features that you need/want that one does better than the other, and even the servers that you want to run this site.

If I were building it, I would lean towards PHP because probably everything you want to do has been done before (with code examples how) and because hosting is so much easier to get (and cheaper because you don't have the licensing issues to deal with compared to Windows hosting). For the same reason, I would choose MySQL as well. It is a great database platform and the price is right.