PHP 5.6 vs PHP 7RC8 - Benchmarking using Docker

New version of PHP, PHP7 has been released yesterday after 11 years of PHP5. I am very excited with it, so I made a benchmark to compare the performance of 2 versions.

The fastest way to test out PHP multi-versions is using Docker image. You can get it from : https://hub.docker.com/_/php/

Let's start pull PHP images

docker pull php:5.6
docker pull php:7

Change directory to the web root folder of PHP project (I used my micro-framework, Sifoni to test). And add this file server.php to web folder with content

<?php

error_reporting(0);

$filename = __DIR__.preg_replace('#(\?.*)$#', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
if (php_sapi_name() === 'cli-server' && is_file($filename)) {
    return false;
}

define('ROOT_PATH', dirname(dirname(__FILE__)));

$autoloader = require_once (ROOT_PATH . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'vendor' . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'autoload.php');

\Sifoni\Engine::getInstance()->init()->bootstrap(array(
    'path.root' => ROOT_PATH,
    'autoloader' => $autoloader,
))->start()->run();

Next, run this command to run with PHP 5.6

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -v `pwd`:/code php:5.6 php -S 0.0.0.0:8080 -t /code/web /code/web/server.php

Open http://localhost:8080/ to see the memory and processing time of PHP5.6.

Continue with PHP7, exit the PHP 5.6 session and run this command

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -v `pwd`:/code php:7 php -S 0.0.0.0:8080 -t /code/web /code/web/server.php

Open http://localhost:8080/ to see the memory and processing time PHP7.

This is my result :

Amazing... PHP 7 is winner in Saving Memory and Processesing Time (about 1.4x times than PHP 5.6).

At the moment I tested, official docker image of PHP is PHP7RC8. Hope image maintainer updates it soon :)