As dynamic content has become more prevalent on the Web, a number of standard mechanisms have evolved to generate such dynamic content. We study three specific mechanisms in common use: PHP, Java servlets, and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). PHP and Java servlets require a direct encoding of the database queries in the application logic. EJB provides a level of indirection, allowing the application logic to call bean methods that then perform database queries. Unlike PHP, which typically executes on the same machine as the Web server, Java servlets and EJB allow the application logic to execute on different machines, including the machine on which the database executes or a completely separate (set of) machine(s). We present a comparison of the performance of these three systems in different configurations for two application benchmarks: an auction site and an online bookstore. We choose these two applications because they impose vastly different loads on the sub-systems: the auction site stresses the Web server front-end while the online bookstore stresses the database. We use open-source software in common use in all of our experiments (the Apache Web server, Tomcat servlet server, Jonas EJB server, and MySQL relational database). The computational demands ofJava servlets are modestly higher than those of PHP. The ability, however, of locating the servlets on a machine different from the Web server results in better performance for Java servlets than for PHP in the case that the application imposes a significant load on the front-end Web server. The computational demands of EJB are much higher than those of PHP and Java servlets. As with Java servlets, we can alleviate EJB's performance problems by putting them on a separate machine, but the resulting overall performance remains inferior to that of the other two systems.