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

Currently there is a project going on with the PHP developers to build better Benchmark tools for PHP.

The project leader did a talk recently on Google Techtalks called Compiling and Optimizing Scripting Languages, and it's a very interesting talk.

Also I did a PHP application size check the other day.

• PHPBB 1.3mb
• Joomla 6mb
• Wordpress 11.3mb

That's data loaded into memory.

Answer 2

PHP may not be as fast as compiled server side languages, but it is still pretty fast and does the job.

The "speed" aspect of php has more to do with the user experience than with the performance itself.

AJAX applications based on PHP don't get categorized as "slow" or "unresponsive": the user has so much to do while a single request completes! Also, being "uniformly slow" with all operations is much less painful for the user than showing having erratic performance speed.

One of the previous comments has summarized it quite aptly: language don't haz speed! the application doez.

cheers, jrh