PHP 8.1 Performance Is Continuing To Improve With Early Benchmarks

Each PHP release continues to improve in the department of performance. Even after the sizable performance improvements made with PHP 7, PHP 8 is continuing to further optimize the performance regardless of using its new JIT. While there still are several months to go until the official PHP 8.1 release, here are a few early benchmarks looking at the PHP CLI performance of PHP 8.1 and prior PHP releases.

For an initial look at the PHP 8.1 performance, I fired up some benchmarks this week of the PHP Git code using an AMD EPYC 7543 TYAN S8036GM2NE-LE server running Ubuntu Linux.

PHP 7.1 through PHP 8.1 (14 July Git) were built from source in the same manner on this AMD EPYC Milan Linux server while looking at the performance across a few different benchmarks.

PHPBench is showing around 3% better performance with PHP 8.1 over PHP 8.0. Or around 33% better performance compared to PHP 7.1 from a few years ago. Of course, the gains are even more remarkable if tossing in the sluggish PHP5 -- benchmarks going back even further will come closer to the official PHP 8.1 release.


PHP 8.1 is looking like a nice evolutionary step forward for this annual PHP release.


In our own workloads, PHP 8 continues performing much better than PHP 7 and especially older PHP 5 releases.

PHP 8.1 should be another nice step forward in the performance department. PHP 8.1 also brings a number of new language features too for further enhancing this popular scripting language.