On the Liip blog today Christian Stocker shares some of the interesting results he's found when working with Symfony2 on the HipHop VM (based on Facebook's work around the HipHop version of optimized PHP). The project recently announced better framework support, so Christian thought he'd give it a try.

We’re currently building a Symfony2 based application, which has pretty high performance requirements (but we can mostly achieve them with varnish), so I went and did some performance tests on that real-life app. [...] In short, the numbers were amazing. I also compared PHP 5.3 with APC against 5.5 with opcache, that alone gave some pretty decent improvements.

He talks about the configuration (hardware and software) he used for the testing and the Apache Bench tool to make the requests. He includes a few tables of the request/response result times comparing the HHVM, PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.5 for:

• Requests per second, small response
• Requests per second, middle response
• Requests per second, large response
• Median response time in ms, short response
• Median response time in ms, middle response
• Median response time in ms, large response

Each also comes with an accompanying graph for those wanting a quick glance version of the results.