The Symfony Finland has shared some benchmarks of the latest versions of the Symfony framework (simple applications) on three current environments to see the differences: PHP 5.6, HHVM 3.11 and PHP 7.0.1.

Since the first functional versions of PHP 7.0.0 were made available, there have been a number of benchmarks comparing PHP 5.6, HHVM and PHP 7. [...] The recently released eZ Platform is a CMS built on the Symfony framework. It's a good representation of a modern PHP application with complex functionalities and no legacy code from the 2000's. Thus making a good candidate benchmarks for testing an application built with the Symfony Framework (version 2.7.8).

So let's see how an application built with the Symfony2 framework fares on PHP 5.6, HHVM 3.11 and PHP 7.0.1.

He starts by describing the test setup including the default installation of the eZ platform and how it was configured/set up. He then shares the results, showing memory usage and response times for each of the three different platforms. There's even results from different parts of the application: the front page and the "Top Stories" and "Projects" pages. The results also include the findings for the number of requests per second both with and without the Symfony Proxy included in the platform.

In this new post to thier blog Kinsta shares benchmark results comparing PHP 7 to HHVM, both in their own experience and some shared from other companies too.

A few years ago, engineers at Facebook went on a swashbuckling mission to rebuild the foundation of the world’s most populated social network struggling to sustain acceptable performance levels. PHP was all the rage a decade ago when Facebook was gaining steam and pursuing a global target audience.

As they put it the "competition is getting closer" and the performance gap between the two is growing smaller and smaller. They talk some about the performance improvements and new features that are being worked into PHP 7 and some speculations around a Just-In-Time engine and asynchronous programming features. Then comes the benchmarks. They provide the specifications of the machine they tested on and the results of tests runs of WordPress and Drupal (based on requests per second). The rest of the article talks about two stories from other companies using HHVM, Etsy and WikiMedia, and some of the lessons that have been learned along the way.

In a new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a humorous look at benchmarking PHP frameworks in a response to some of the other recent posts from developers on the Symfony and Solar frameworks.

Some recent attention in the PHP framework community has been focused on the recent publication of Symfony 2 Preview benchmarks showing that Symfony 2 outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 3.5. It also outperforms every other benchmarked framework. [...] My fellow Zend Frameworkers, we cannot allow this to stand. [...] I have created the benchmark of benchmarks. Well, to be honest, I only really edited another benchmark. But still, it will prove Zend Framework is faster than everything else out there.

His benchmarks are a little different from the rest with both the usual comparisons between the framework request numbers and a bit of explanation on how the Zend Framework came out on top - he cheated. What it really boiled down to was how the code that was tested was written. His code was optimized in a few different ways (All-in vs the Optimized/More-Optimized/What-The-Fuck-Optimized) and he includes custom benchmarks to show how they differ. What it really boils down to from his perspective is simply put:

Benchmarks. Useless. Final words? Know your framework! All this benchmarking nonsense does little good unless it's plastered with disclaimers.

Brandon Savage has posted a response to a recent set of benchmarks as run comparing ASP.NET and PHP's processing speeds.

But benchmarks, for all their decision-making aid, fail under the best of circumstances for one simple reason: they’re not real life. Never more is this true than in Joe Stagner's blog post on whether Windows or Linux, and PHP or ASP was faster. [...] Benchmarks come loaded with all sorts of problems. It doesn’t matter if it’s Microsoft doing them or Apple doing them; they don’t mimic real-world conditions, and any number of factors affect how the benchmarks are rendered.

Keeping these things in mind, Brandon looks at some of the issues he found with how the benchamrks were run, the largest of which was comparing the ASP.NET results (with byte code caching) to a PHP install without APC enabled.

Even more good news for mysqlnd users out there - according to this new post on the Internet Super Hero blog, some of the tuning options it enables can help you save 40% of the memory you were using before.

mysqlnd saves memory. It consumes half as much memory as libmysql. This is what we have been convinced of. This is what we taught you. Then I tried to test it and made Andrey get nervous for a few hours… Meanwhile he is fine again and we can announce: mysqlnd saves memory, not only in theory, we tested it - we can proof it, can we?

The proof comes in the form of a few "tricks" and some of the settings that the software can use to optimize buffer sizes. Benchmarks (and the code to run them) are also included to show what the differences are between mysqlnd and libmysql.

Even more good news for mysqlnd users out there - according to this new post on the Internet Super Hero blog, some of the tuning options it enables can help you save 40% of the memory you were using before.

mysqlnd saves memory. It consumes half as much memory as libmysql. This is what we have been convinced of. This is what we taught you. Then I tried to test it and made Andrey get nervous for a few hours… Meanwhile he is fine again and we can announce: mysqlnd saves memory, not only in theory, we tested it - we can proof it, can we?

The proof comes in the form of a few "tricks" and some of the settings that the software can use to optimize buffer sizes. Benchmarks (and the code to run them) are also included to show what the differences are between mysqlnd and libmysql.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a new post talking about the combination of PHP and Resin (a high-performance application server).

The Resin high-performance, open source application server features load balancing for increased reliability. Caucho's Quercus(TM) is a fast, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language allowing developers to use PHP flexibility for the web interface and Java for stability.

He also talks about some key points surrounding this server as effects PHP developers:

• Performance
• Development
• Capability
• Security
• Scalability

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a new post talking about the combination of PHP and Resin (a high-performance application server).

The Resin high-performance, open source application server features load balancing for increased reliability. Caucho's Quercus(TM) is a fast, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language allowing developers to use PHP flexibility for the web interface and Java for stability.

He also talks about some key points surrounding this server as effects PHP developers:

• Performance
• Development
• Capability
• Security
• Scalability

As a New Year's gift to the PHP community, Paul Jones has created some benchmarks for some of the popular PHP frameworks, comparing the basic functionality of creating a page in each.

As such, I have prepared a new set of benchmarks for Cake, Solar, Symfony, and Zend Framework using an almost identical methodology as last time.

The last time is a set of previous benchmarks he ran to test the response times for each of the four frameworks - CakePHP, Solar, Symfony, and the Zend Framework.

The stats have changed a little from the previous results, but overall it's pretty similar - the latest version of each of them shows Solar coming out on top and Symfony as the slowest in its "limitation of responsiveness in a dynamic environment". You can download the log files and the complete report of the tests here.

UPDATE: Paul has also made the code for the benchmark project available to the public on a Google project - http://code.google.com/p/web-framework-benchmarks/.

As a New Year's gift to the PHP community, Paul Jones has created some benchmarks for some of the popular PHP frameworks, comparing the basic functionality of creating a page in each.

As such, I have prepared a new set of benchmarks for Cake, Solar, Symfony, and Zend Framework using an almost identical methodology as last time.

The last time is a set of previous benchmarks he ran to test the response times for each of the four frameworks - CakePHP, Solar, Symfony, and the Zend Framework.

The stats have changed a little from the previous results, but overall it's pretty similar - the latest version of each of them shows Solar coming out on top and Symfony as the slowest in its "limitation of responsiveness in a dynamic environment". You can download the log files and the complete report of the tests here.

UPDATE: Paul has also made the code for the benchmark project available to the public on a Google project - http://code.google.com/p/web-framework-benchmarks/.