Which one is the fastest PHP?
Zeev Suraski – Zend's CTO & Co-Founder published a great detailed benchmark article between PHP (5.4, 5.5, 5.6) & HHVM (3.1, 3.2) & PHPNG (PHP Next Generation).
Summary:
- OPcache makes a huge difference. Ok, we didn't need this benchmark to prove this yet again, but if there's anybody out there still living under a rock and running PHP w/o an opcode cache, that's by far the easiest performance boost you can get - anywhere between 2x to 6x in these benchmarks.
- PHP 5.5 and 5.6 are similar in performance, with a small but nice 3-5% performance gain
- hhvm 3.1 and 3.2 are similar in performance; 3.2 is faster than 3.1 in some cases, while slower in others.
- Contrary to popular belief, hhvm is not orders of magnitude faster than PHP in real world applications (unless you compare against PHP 5.4 w/o an opcode cache). We know this all too well - excellent 5x or 10x gains in Mandelbrot or Fibonacci doesn't necessarily translate into similar gains in real world apps.
- Our guest of honor, PHPNG, is MUCH faster than PHP 5.6. It's anywhere between 1.5x and 2.1x faster performance in terms of requests per second versus PHP 5.6. Even more interestingly, while it's slower than hhvm in some cases, it's faster in many others.
Right now there are no pre-built binaries available for any distro, so it will take more time for PHPNG to be production ready..
I am still living under a rock with PHP 5.3.3 after reading this, what about you?