In a new post to his site Andi Gutmans talks about how the "web is about to get 2x faster" with the first stable release of PHP 7, the latest major version of the PHP language.

Today the Web is about to get twice as fast. PHP, the most popular Web development language, which runs by some estimates 80% of the Web sites, is getting a big step-up in speed.

Underlying this exciting news there is heroism. [...] This is what I call the fun part of being a hero. It is quick. Energizing. We’re stressed but our survival instincts kick into gear. [...] With today’s release of PHP 7, PHP-based Web sites will be running twice as fast without needing to make any changes to the underlying software code. This is an amazing accomplishment! [...] But this is not a story of technology but rather of true heroism. A story of persistence. A lot of sweat. Many disappointments and frustration.

He starts back when PHP was just in its infancy and talks briefly about the amount of work (in 2012) put into a major rework to improve PHP's performance only to end up with not much difference. Instead of giving up on the goal, the "heroism" idea kicked in and work was done to make the real improvements PHP needed to get the performance they wanted. The end result of hard work (and much discussion) was the PHP 7 we have today, improving performance dramatically.