PHP 8.1 Benchmarks - Continuing The Nice Performance Trajectory

PHP 8.1 released on Thursday as the latest major feature release for this programming language. In this article are some benchmarks of PHP 8.1.0 on an AMD EPYC powered Linux server compared to prior releases going as far back as PHP 5.6.

As previously covered, PHP 8.1 introduces many new language features like PHP "Fibers", enums, read-only class properties, new fsync functions, and much more. PHP 8.1 is another great annual update to this server-side language. But as we've seen over the past number of years since the late PHP 5.x era, the performance has continued improving.

In this article are some initial PHP 8.1 benchmarks looking at its performance compared to prior releases. All PHP releases were freshly built on the same system against the same packages and using the same build options. Tested for this comparison were PHP 8.1, PHP 8.0.13, PHP 7.4.26, PHP 7.3.33, PHP 7.0.33, and PHP 5.6.40. PHP 7.1/7.2 were left out due to segmentation faults experienced when building and running those versions on this stack. PHP 5.6 was as far back as tested, with 5.6.0 having been released in 2014 while PHP 5.6.40 as the last point release is from early 2019.

The tests were carried out on an AMD EPYC 72F3 server running Ubuntu Linux.