Early PHP 7.3 Performance Benchmarks Are Looking Good

Released this week was the first alpha of PHP 7.3 and I decided to take it for a spin with some benchmarks. While not as dramatic as going from PHP5 to PHP 7.0, the performance of PHP7 continues getting better.

PHP 7.3 so far introduces several new functions, finally drops support for BeOS, updates the bundled SQLite version, expands WebP support, improves PHP garbage collection, and other enhancements. PHP 7.3 is tentatively planned for release at the end of November while over the months ahead are more alphas/betas/RCs.

While performance improvements aren't explicitly noted aside from the garbage collection improvements, this weekend on an AMD Ryzen 3 box I ran some tests with Ubuntu.

The same system configuration was used for the testing and during the testing process PHP 7.0.30, 7.1.18, 7.2.6, and 7.3.0 Alpha 1 were built from source in the same manner, etc.

In the common PHPBench PHP benchmark, PHP 7.3.0 Alpha 1 was about 7% faster than the current PHP 7.2 stable series. Not bad when considering all of the PHP performance improvements in recent years.

Then I moved onto some of my own PHP benchmarks of the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org hot code paths. PHP 7.3.0 Alpha 1 was much faster in the render test, which is carrying out a lot of XML processing to obtain the result data, dealing with PHP objects, and ultimately generating SVG graphs such as the graphs you are looking at here... In this automated test case, PHP 7.2.6 to PHP 7.3.0 A1 is the biggest improvement in performance since going from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

In the merge result process that is a lot of data processing and combining of XML data sets, PHP 7.3 also is looking like a very nice performance improvement.

From this initial weekend benchmarking, PHP 7.3 is looking quite good on the performance front and it will be interesting to see how it performs with more benchmarks when it's ready to premiere by the end of this year.