PHP 7.4-RC1 Released With The Performance Looking Real Good - PHP 7.4 Benchmarks

PHP 7.4-RC1 was released this week as this next annual update to the PHP programming implementation nears. Here is a look at how the PHP 7.4-RC1 performance looks like compared to the major releases going back to PHP 5.6.

PHP 7.4-RC1 fixes a variety of bugs ranging from parsing errors to a segmentation fault to other core bugs. There are no new features with PHP 7.4 having been under its feature freeze since July. At least five more release candidates to PHP 7.4 are expected before its general availability release around the end of November.

Among the prominent changes with PHP 7.4 are the FFI extension finally being present to access C functions/variables/structures, preload functionality, TGA image support within the GD extension, SQLite3 Online Backup API support, PHP Hash is part of PHP core, TLS 1.3 support for OpenSSL streams and much more.

The performance of PHP 7.4 is going up as well. Here are a few benchmarks I conducted this weekend looking at PHP 7.4-RC1 against the latest point releases to PHP 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, and 5.6. Tests were done on the AMD EPYC 7742 2P server while running Debian Linux.



It's wonderful to see PHP 7.4's performance continue to improve even after all the optimizations from PHP5 to PHP7 and the new releases continuing to incrementally enhance the performance. Look for PHP 7.4.0 coming out in just under three months and at that point will also be more benchmarks on Phoronix.