PHP Performance Testing

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PHP is one of the most widely used server-side programming languages, powering around 76% of active websites. Every year, we publish our in-depth performance tests for various PHP frameworks in order to see how different PHP versions compare to each other.

As of December 2023, we tested PHP 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 on 11 content management systems (CMS) and frameworks: WordPress , WooCommerce , Drupal (versions 7 and 10), Joomla , Laravel , Symfony , CodeIgniter , Craft CMS , Typo3, Opencart , and Statamic . We also tested WordPress and WooCommerce with PHP 7.4, as many sites are still running on this version.

As a best practice, we recommend always using the latest version of PHP to optimize performance and security.

Our PHP Tests
To evaluate the performance of a CMS or framework with the latest PHP versions, we perform performance tests. To maintain consistency, we use the same machine and the same parameters for each CMS or framework tested.

The benchmark tests for this article were performed in the following environments:

Machine : Intel Cascade Lake (30-core CPU) at 3.10 GHz, 120 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD. A Compute-Optimized (C2) virtual machine powered by Google Cloud Platform and running in an isolated container.
Operating system : Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS (Focal Fossa).
CMS and Frameworks : Default settings, installed with DDEV v1.22.5 amd64on nginx-fpmas --webserver-typebased on image version 1.22.0.
PHP versions : 7.4.33, 8.1.26, 8.2.13, 8.3.0
Database :ddev-dbserver-mariadb-10.4
Tools : ab – Apache HTTP Server Benchmarking Tool .
Concurrency: 15 requests at the same time.
Requests: 1000 requests per session.
Results : Obtained in requests per second (req/s). The higher the result, the faster the response.
CMS and Frameworks
PHP is well known for its vast library of frameworks and CMS. We laos whatsapp number data took a few things into consideration when choosing which one to test, including:

Popularity
Active websites
Market position
Usage trends
Search volume (US)
For example, WordPress continues to shine, accounting for 62% of the entire CMS market , with over 34 million active websites and a sharp increase in its usage over time .

On the other hand, although Statamic has a smaller footprint on the web, with around 10,000 active sites , its strong growth and rise in popularity have caught our attention.

We've also included Symfony. Although it has been losing popularity in recent years compared to its former heyday, Symfony still has many active sites and a high monthly search volume.

The other CMS and frameworks we chose as reference met the same standards.