On the PHP.net site they've made an announcement about releases of all currently supported major PHP versions with bugfix/security releases.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP [7.0.33, 7.1.25, and 7.2.13]. Five security-related issues were fixed in this release. All PHP 7.0 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

You can download these latest releases from either the main downloads page or windows.php.net for the Windows executables.

There's also a note for the PHP 7.0.33 release based on the release and support timelines: this will be the final release, of any kind, for the PHP 7.0.x branch including security support. If you haven't already upgraded past version 7.0.x, there's never been a better time!

The Kinsta blog has published an article they call the Definitive PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 72. and HHVM benchmarks providing a comparison between these different versions running different popular PHP software (including WordPress, Drupal and Magento 2).

Each year we try and take a deep dive into performance benchmarks across various platforms and see how different versions of PHP and HHVM stack up against each other. This year we went all out and benchmarked four different PHP engines and HHVM across 20 different platforms/configurations; including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Laravel, Symfony, and many more. We also tested popular eCommerce solutions such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Magento, and PrestaShop.

[...] The results this year have drastically changed from our previous benchmarks where HHVM was the winner. We now are excited to see PHP 7.2 as the leading engine in terms of speed. [...] This is great news for developers and end-users alike as it means more of a focus back on PHP and providing faster websites and web services for everyone.

The post then starts with a look at the system setup (well, Google Cloud instance) that's used for the testing and how it is configured. From there it goes into the test results from each of the different types of software:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla!
• Magento 2
• Grav CMS
• October CMS
• Laravel
• Symfony
• PyroCMS
• Pagekit
• Bolt
• AnchorCMS
• PrestaShop
• CraftCMS
• ForkCMS

As you can see there's more of a leaning towards content management and e-commerce solutions in their list. It's good to see base frameworks in the list too, however. For each item in the list they provide a graph of the results showing requests per second.

The PHP.net has announced the release of several new versions of the language including a few bugfix versions for stable releases and the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 7.2.0. The versions that have been released are:

• PHP 5.6.32
• PHP 7.0.25
• PHP 7.1.11
• PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 5

Most of these releases take care of similar bugs found across the different releases with some differences between them. While the others are production releases and it is recommended that you upgrade to those where possible, the Release Candidate is pre-production and should not be considered stable yet.

You can download the stable releases from the downloads page for source or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. The Release Candidate can be downloaded from the source package QA site or the Windows QA site for the binaries.

On the Symfony Finland site they've post together a post sharing some benchmark results of Symfony on PHP 7.0 versus 7.1, the most recent major release of the PHP language with some improvements of its own.

PHP 7.1 was launched on December 1st 2016. This was the first minor release after the release of 7.0 a year ago. PHP 7.0 was a revolutionary product, especially when it comes to memory usage and performance. PHP 7.1 is a more modest upgrade that brings new features and improved performance. But how much has performance improved from a year back?

The benchmarking uses the eZ Platform demo running a full CMS similar to the previous benchmarking done in 2015. The checks were run using:

• a "clean" environment (no caching, PHP-FPM just restarted and no APC cache)
• standard requests running in development mode
• more requests but this time in production mode

The post shares the results with a few graphs showing them in terms of response time for both sequential and concurrent page requests.

The PHP project has officially released the latest versions of the language in the PHP 5.5.x and PHP 7.0.x series: PHP 5.5.36 and PHP 7.0.7:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.36. This is a security release. Several security bugs were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

As always, you can download these latest releases from either the main downloads page (source) or from the windows.php.net site for the Windows binaries. For a full list of the changes, you can check out the Changelogs for each release.