From the ‘Don’t Abandon PHP Yet’ files:
You can count me among those that have been seriously looking at Facebook’s HHVM as an alternative to running PHP (for PHP
applications). My concern has been about speed, since simply put HHVM is smoking fast in comparison to PHP 5.5/5.6. But a new data set out today showing the relative performance of HHVM against the upcoming PHP 7 release will cause me (and I suspect many others too) to think twice.
According to the data, running drupal 7.27 on PHP 7 is 4.23 percent faster than running it on HHVM, that number rises to 25 percent faster for those running earlier builds of the in-development Drupal 8 release.
But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine for PHP 7 either. WordPress 4.1 is actually 0.79 percent SLOWER on PHP 7 than it is on HHVM. That said, PHP 7 running WordPress 4.1 is still 96.34 percent FASTER than using PHP 5.6
So, the long story short is that PHP 7 will be a significant boost over PHP 5.6 and in some cases will be faster than HHVM too. Given that it’s still early days for PHP 7 and the final release is still months away, I suspect there will be further innovations and improvements. HHVM will also continue to improve as well. The net result is that we can all expect to win as PHP applications will be the big winners overall.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
