How good is PHP performance?

Question

This is a follow up to a recent post I\'ve seen which suggests that PHP performance is poor:

\"PHP. IS. ALWAYS. THE. BOTTLENECK. My server farms, let me show you them! P

Answer 1

Performance is greatly improved by using an op-code cache like The Alternative PHP Cache which is free and provides an significant performance increase by essentially "compiling" your scripts into op codes that can be used by the Zend Engine directly without the overhead (an overused term IMO) of parsing the code on each request. You can see a benchmark here and a post from my blog about using APC cache for speeding up Zend_Loader