The Facebook team working on the HHVM project for being a faster PHP interpreter and powering their Hack language have just come out of a two-week, open-source performance lockdown. Over the past two weeks they focused on making strides to make HHVM's compelling performance even better.

The developers were mainly focused on speeding up HHVM for WordPress, Drupal 7, and MediaWiki workloads. According to today's blog post, "During lockdown we achieved a 19.4% RPS improvement for Mediawiki workloads, and a 1.8% RPS improvement for WordPress. We demonstrated that HHVM is 55.5% faster than PHP 7 on a Mediawiki workload, 18.7% faster on a WordPress workload, and 10.2% faster on a Drupal 7 workload. Improvements made to HHVM to better serve open source frameworks will ship with the next release."

These gains are quite exciting given that PHP 7 is already proving to be much faster than PHP 5. As soon as the next HHVM benchmark is out, we'll carry out our own PHP benchmarks on Phoronix.