PHP 7.3-RC1 Released, Benchmarks Looking Good For This Next PHP7 Update

Released this week was the first RC milestone for the PHP 7.3 feature update due out before year's end. This weekend I ran some fresh PHP benchmarks looking at its performance.

The PHP 7.3 release candidate is made up of many fixes ranging from memory corruption and segmentation faults to undefined symbols and other problems. The list of changes can be found via the NEWS entry.

PHP 7.3 is already under its feature freeze but work this cycle has brought the exciting FFI foreign function interface to access functions / variables / data structures from the C language, a platform-independent manner for obtaining information on network interfaces, a is_countable() call added, WebP support within GD's image create from string, updated SQLite support, improved PHP garbage collection performance, and other enhancements.

Earlier this cycle I've already run some PHP 7.3 beta benchmarks while for the release candidate I took some time this Sunday morning to run some quick tests using PHPBench.

On an AMD EPYC 7601 + Tyan 2U server running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, I ran some benchmarks of the PHP Git branches from master (now 7.4-dev) compared to the other past release series in recent history...

PHP 7.3 on this AMD EPYC Linux server is currently about 5% faster than PHP 7.2, which in turn is already significantly faster than PHP 7.1/7.0. PHP7 is also significantly faster than the PHP5 days, but those releases weren't tested due to PHP5 build problems on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Long story short, PHP 7.3 is a small improvement over PHP 7.2 in the performance department but new features like PHP FFI make for this latest PHP installment quite exciting and still much faster than the old PHP5 days.

More details on PHP 7.3-RC1 are available from PHP.net. At least five more release candidates are expected before releasing PHP 7.3.0 around mid-December. I'll have more PHP benchmarks in different workloads as that PHP 7.3 release nears.