Benchmark 2025: PHP vs Competitors — Who is Faster and More Efficient

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Benchmark 2025: PHP vs competitors — who wins the performance race?

In the world of web development, PHP has long been the "workhorse," but with the emergence of Go, Rust, and fast scripting languages, the question often arose: "Isn't PHP outdated?" In 2025, the situation has changed dramatically. We analyzed the latest benchmarks (June 2025) and are ready to present an objective picture. The tests were conducted on identical hardware (AMD Ryzen 9, 64GB RAM, NVMe SSD) using standard HTTP loads (WRK, 10,000 connections) and Fibonacci number calculations/JSON serialization.

Speed leaders: Rust and Go, but PHP is breathing down their necks

The undisputed record holders for raw speed are Rust and Go. Compiled Rust code showed up to 980,000 requests per second (RPS) on a simple JSON endpoint. Go lagged slightly behind — 920,000 RPS. However, PHP 8.4 with JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation made a real breakthrough: 780,000 RPS. This is 40% more than Node.js (550,000 RPS) and 3.5 times more than Python 3.13 (220,000 RPS).

Rust (Actix-web): 980k RPS — absolute champion.
Go (Fiber): 920k RPS — almost catches up to Rust.
PHP 8.4 (FrankenPHP + JIT): 780k RPS — an unexpected leap.
Node.js 22: 550k RPS — stable middle-of-the-pack.
Python 3.13 (FastAPI): 220k RPS — outsider in raw speed.

Memory consumption: PHP saves resources

Here, PHP 8.4 performed best among interpreted languages. Processing 10,000 concurrent requests, PHP used only 120 MB of RAM. For comparison: Node.js — 210 MB, Python — 380 MB. Rust and Go, as expected, were even more economical (48 MB and 65 MB respectively), but PHP took an honorable third place, surpassing all competitors from the scripting language world.

Realistic scenario: working with a database

Benchmarking "raw" speed is good, but in reality, PHP most often works with MySQL/PostgreSQL. A test of 1000 SELECT queries with a JSON response showed:

PHP 8.4 (PDO + OpCache) — 3400 RPS.
Go (database/sql) — 4100 RPS.
Rust (sqlx) — 4500 RPS.
Node.js (Sequelize) — 2800 RPS.
Python (SQLAlchemy) — 1200 RPS.

The gap between PHP and Go/Rust has narrowed to 20-25%, making it quite competitive for most web projects. The main bonus is that development time in PHP is 2-3 times less than in Rust, with comparable final performance.

Conclusions: PHP 2025 is not a "slowpoke"

If you are looking for extreme performance for microservices — choose Rust or Go. But for a typical web application (CMS, online store, API), PHP 8.4 with JIT and modern frameworks (L