what are the changes that supposedly make php5 faster than php4? when java went from the 1.4 series to the 5 series it became much faster. this is because of enhancements to the jitter mechanism for sure. i dont know what else they changed, but i know that had a great impact on the performance. php5 passes objects around by reference automatically, whereas in php4 if you do not specifically assign references using the =& construct a copy will be created. i suspect if your test included a scenario where the =& mechanism was not used in php4, it would not be as fast as the php5 counterpart, simply because more memory would be consumed. indeed i suspect there is plenty of php4 code where people have forgotten to assign object references using =&. -nathan On 8/24/07, Steve Brown <sbrown25@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Recently, I've been doing a lot of benchmarking with Apache to compare > different OSes and platforms. I did a stock install of Ubuntu 7.04 > Server w/ Apache2 and PHP5. To do the test, I used ab to fetch the > following document: > > <html> > <head> > <title>PHP Web Server Test</title> > </head> > <body> > <?php phpinfo(); ?> > </body> > </html> > > I ran ab in a loop 12 times with 10,000 connections and a concurrency > of 10. Then I threw out the highest result and the lowest result and > averaged the remaining values. Both PHP4 (v 4.4.7) and PHP5 (v > 5.2.3) were built as Apache modules, and I simply changed Apache's > config file to swap modules. > > The results were somewhat surprising to me: on average, PHP4 > significantly outperformed PHP5. Over our LAN PHP5 handled roughly > 1,200 requests / sec while PHP4 handled over 1,800 requests / sec. > Since everything I have heard/read is that PHP5 is much faster than > PHP4, I expected the opposite to be true, but the numbers are what > they are. Also PHP on Apache1 was much faster than on Apache2. > > The only difference I can figure is that PHP5 was the packaged version > that comes with Ubuntu and I had to compile PHP4 from source since > there is no package for it in Feisty. But I wouldn't expect a 50% > increase as a result of that. Any thoughts on this? > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >