PHP PHP 8.1.0 vs 8.0.13 vs 7.4.26 vs 7.3.33 vs 7.2.34 Benchmarks

PHP 8.1.0 GA stable release is out so doing my usual comparison benchmarks like before.

However, I'm currently quite busy so no time for my usual fancy chart creation, so below are just the raw tabulated results and I've reduced the number of PHP versions tested to just PHP 7.2 to 7.4 and PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1. If you want to roughly compare with previous PHP 7.0/7.1 and PHP 5.6, you can look at previous comparison benchmarks done here. And if you want you can grab the raw text based benchmark results here to create your own charts.

System:

• OVH MC-32 Intel Core i7 4790K
• 32GB Memory
• 2x240GB SSD
• 250Mbit Network Bandwidth
• CentOS 7.9 64bit
• Centmin Mod 123.09beta01 LEMP stack - Nginx 1.21.4, MariaDB 10.3 MySQL, + CSF Firewall
• BHS, Canada

PHP 8.1.0 vs 8.0.13 vs 7.4.26 vs 7.3.33 vs 7.2.34 Benchmarks

Tests use the following scripts

• bench.php (official PHP file) - take the average of 3 runs
• micro_bench.php (official PHP file) - take the average of 3 runs
• detailed_benchmark.php - take the average of 3 runs

Notes:

• Times are in seconds where lower is faster
  
• Tested Remi YUM repo SCL based PHP versions versus Centmin Mod built PHP versions with and without Profile Guided Optimisations.
  
• Centmin Mod PHP-FPM compiled using GCC 11.2.1
  
• PGO = Profile Guided Optimisations (for Wordpress, MediaWiki and Drupal like PHP web applications and similar PHP execution patterns.)
• Centmin Mod defaults to non-PGO PHP-FPM builds for PHP 7 by default. PGO built PHP might be faster for some specific PHP code but slower for others so choose PGO wisely.

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