PHP 7.0 Is Showing Very Promising Performance Over PHP 5, Closing Gap With HHVM
First up is the result from the list-suites portion of the test, which is the time required to list all available suites. The operations here basically come down to a lot of file handling, the built-in math functions, and XML results parsing using SimpleXML.
PHP 7.0 RC2 was easily the fastest, but this isn't the most intense part of the test...
The render test is arguably the most interesting part of this testing. The render test basically covers everything from reading a lot of XML files, parsing them (SimpleXML), merging them together into the relevant PTS objects, and then using our own pts_Graph graphing implementation, generates the SVG result graphs using the PHP DOM, and then dumps them out to the temporary directory. This render-test is using a sample data-set of 300,000 benchmark results from LinuxBenchmarking.com test. If you're a Phoronix reader, the results for this test are important as it directly impacts the experience with OpenBenchmarking.org when viewing embedded graph results in Phoronix articles/reviews (even this article) with the same code-paths being called. It also affects how quickly we can analyze large performance data-sets on Phoromatic.
With the render test, PHP 7.0 is way faster than any previous PHP 5 release! In fact, it's about 2.38x faster than PHP 5.6 stable. Next is a look at the total time for running all of these sub-tests of the important areas of the Phoronix Test Suite:
While PHP developers have been tuning for WordPress and other popular web services, it's great to see that even for code-bases that the upstream developers properly never tested against that there's 2x performance gains here too! This is for the cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite run from the command-line without any form of caching or web server running. The performance of all my testing of PHP 7.0 in its current development form has been fantastic.
Not only is the performance a lot faster, but the memory usage is noticeably lower too under PHP 7. The memory_get_peak_usage(true) reports noticeably lower memory use than PHP 5. PHP 7.0 RC2's peak memory usage was about 63% that of PHP 5.6 stable.
PHP 7.0 is looking and performing great, but how does it compare to Facebook's HHVM?