PHP’s HipHop outperforms PHP 5.5 with Zend OPCache and Nginx by 15-20 times

A very interesting benchmark on www.alexfu.it shows excellent comparisons of

• plain PHP on Nginx (PHP 5.3 I think)
• PHP on Nginx with APC enabled
• PHP 5.5 with OPcache enabled
• PHP (5.3 I think) in HipHop VM

The result is awesome: While PHP 5.5 with OPcache runs faster than HipHop (!) when running a naked Symfony2 application (which is not representative by the way), the HipHop virtual machine clearly kills everything in a high-CPU application:

1. HipHop can handle 20x more requests per second than PHP 5.5 on Nginx with OPcache (which is already much faster than plain PHP)
2. HipHop serves a stack of requests in only 8% of the time PHP 5.5 on Nginx with OPcache needs.

Get the full benchmarks here:

http://alexfu.it/2013/10/22/symfony-benchmark-on-hhvm.html

Update: Another great post with similar results

https://blog.liip.ch/archive/2013/10/29/hhvm-and-symfony2.html