An Early Look At Some PHP 7.4 Performance Benchmarks

The initial PHP 7.4 Alpha 1 release is just two weeks away already... Curious about the performance of this yearly update to PHP7, I ran some benchmarks on the latest development code as of this morning compared to the earlier PHP7 releases and even PHP-8.0 that is in development on Git master.

PHP 7.4 has been working on preloading options, short closures, custom object serialization, FFI work that didn't end up making it for PHP 7.3, the null coalescing assignment operator has been added, and various other changes. The PHP 7.4 alpha releases are supposed to kick off on 6 June while the betas will then fire up starting on 18 July followed by at least six release candidates beginning at the end of August. If all goes well, PHP 7.4.0 will make its debut around the end of November or early December. PHP-7.4 has been branched since January while PHP-8.0 development is on Git master for that next major PHP8 release with JIT functionality and other changes in the works.

Curious about the pre-alpha performance state of PHP 7.4, I ran some quick benchmarks today against PHP 7.3.6, 7.2.18, 7.1.29, and 7.0.32 built from Git and each release built in the same manner.

PHPBench's performance with 7.4 at this stage is right on par with PHP 7.3 stable, which is already about 30% faster than where it was at with PHP 7.0... Of course, an even greater gain compared to the old days of PHP 5.5.

PHP 7.4 if anything was just slightly faster than PHP 7.3 in the micro-benchmarks while PHP-8.0 performance is similar, at least until the JIT code is stabilized and flipped on by default.

In the Phoronix Test Suite's internal PHP self-benchmarks, PHP 7.4 is indeed riding around the PHP 7.3 performance level -- at least in this pre-alpha state. There's been some remarkable gains since PHP 7.0 and more so since the slow PHP5 releases.


More tests on PHP 7.4 will be coming as its release approaches later this year.