Benchmarks Of PHP 7.2 Beta: PHP Is Still Getting Faster

PHP 7.2 Beta 1 was released yesterday as the next step towards this next refinement to PHP7 that is expected to be officially released in November. I couldn't help but to run some initial benchmarks.

PHP 7.2 Beta 1 presents the Sodium extension for modern and easy-to-use cryptography, opcache improvements, better JSON decoding of invalid UTF-8 data, and many bug fixes among other improvements since PHP 7.1. The latest release and more details can be found via PHP.net.

I've been testing out PHP 7.2 Beta 1 and haven't encountered any regressions yet with my codes. I also couldn't help but to run some performance benchmarks of PHP 7.2 Beta 1 compared to previous releases. PHP 7.2 Beta 1's performance was compared to PHP 7.1.7, 7.0.21, and 5.6.31.

There's obviously the biggest boost in performance for PHPBench when going from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0... That shouldn't surprise any one. But it was also exciting to see the performance boost with PHP 7.2 Beta 1 and was a bit unexpected. PHP 7.2 is currently running around 13% faster with PHPBench over PHP 7.1, or 20% over PHP 7.0. Or PHP 7.2 compared to PHP 5.6 is a 2.6x difference.

With the Phoronix Test Suite's own self-test, PHP 7.2 shows it's getting faster too. Using PHP 7.2 Beta 1 trimmed off the test time by 4 seconds albeit still a fraction of the savings compared to the PHP 5.6 to 7.0 transition.

The render test of generating SVG graphs with lots of PHP math, DOM object usage, and more, is slightly faster on PHP 7.2.

PHP 7 continues moving in the right direction. Overall, PHP 7.2 is looking bright for release later this year as besides these modest performance boosts is the Sodium extension and other improvements.