Benchmarks

All benchmarks run on Apple M4 (14 cores), comparing zphp (ReleaseFast) against PHP 8.5 (no JIT). Benchmarks are in the benchmarks/ directory and can be reproduced locally.

Runtime

Six compute-heavy benchmarks. Best of 5 runs. Startup overhead is subtracted to measure pure execution time.

Benchmark	PHP	zphp	Ratio
string_ops	97 ms	27 ms	0.28x
array_ops	98 ms	29 ms	0.30x
objects	97 ms	36 ms	0.37x
closures	98 ms	83 ms	0.85x
loops	130 ms	120 ms	0.92x
fibonacci	161 ms	157 ms	0.97x

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
./benchmarks/runtime/run

HTTP throughput

Measured with wrk: 4 threads, 100 connections, 10 seconds. All servers return echo "hello".

Server	req/s	Avg latency
zphp serve	92,343	1.12 ms
nginx + php-fpm (128 workers)	42,088	50.37 ms

2.2x throughput, 45x lower latency compared to nginx + php-fpm.

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
./benchmarks/serve/wrk_bench

Note: nginx + php-fpm numbers are from Docker with linux/amd64 emulation on Apple Silicon. Native Linux performance would be better for php-fpm. These numbers are directional, not absolute. Run the benchmarks on your own hardware for numbers relevant to your deployment.

Formatter

Formatting a 416-line PHP file. Best of 10 runs.

Tool	Time
zphp fmt	5 ms
php-cs-fixer (PSR-12)	92 ms
prettier @prettier/plugin-php	95 ms

./benchmarks/fmt