On the Kinsta blog Mark Gavalda has shared their latest PHP 7 versus HHVM benchmarks now that the first official stable release of PHP 7 has been unleashed for public consumption. They opted for testing with a large variety of tools and software rather than simple benchmarking scripts to give a more "real world" look at the difference between the two.

To see how much of an improvement we can expect from this new PHP interpreter we put the public release version of PHP 7.0 to test and compared a couple of popular software suites’ performance using PHP 5.6.16, PHP 7.0 and HHVM 3.10.1 on a bare metal server (so virtualization doesn’t interfere with the results). Tested software includes WordPress 4.3.1, Drupal 8, Magento 2.0 CE, OctoberCMS build 309, PyroCMS v3 beta2, and Flarum v0.1.0-beta.4.

The basic tl;dr of the post is that HHVM still performs better for all of the software tested but PHP 7 is not too far off on some of them. They share the specifications of the machine (bare metal) they used for testing and get into the results for each of the seven pieces of software tested. Their results are in transactions per second and both graphed and numeric results are shown. Unfortunately, though, the Flarum software had to be kept on a "pending" list as it doesn't run on either PHP 7 or HHVM properly.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog Jeff Smith introduces Flarum, a project that bills itself as "forums made simple" that's easy to set up and includes both the standard features you'd expect from a forum and some interesting "power" ones as well.

Flarum is a forums solution that is currently in public beta and is under active development. Today we’re going to take a look at it, get it set up in a Homestead Improved Vagrant virtual machine, and look at the configuration and the features that Flarum offers. Then, we’ll compare it to some other forums platforms to see how it stacks up at a glance.

They start with a bit of environment setup including the creation of the Homestead virtual machine. The tutorial then roughly follows the installation guide and helps you get the software installed, the web server configured and configuring the software via the Admin interface. They help you set up some of the basics, permissions, change the appearance of the site and work with tags and extensions. They get more into this last topic, introducing some of the things you can customize in the layout and links to more information on both extensions and themes. The post ends with a brief overview of some of the general features that the forum offers including it being touch friendly, "friendly" URLs and easy moderation functionality.