PHP Performance over time: PHP 5.6 - PHP 8.0 RC3
About six years ago, I was at a point where I nearly gave up on PHP. For fun, I solved Project Euler puzzles, and PHP (at that time, I was using a 32-bit version on top of it) was excruciatingly slow when solving these puzzles. Fast-forward to 2020: I had the puzzles I solved back then lying around on Github. As those consist mainly of math, nothing changed functionality wise - but they are a perfect starting point to see how PHP Performance changed over time.
Setup
In 2014, I already implemented a microtime-based timer to get performance measurements. PHPUnit test cases trigger the execution of the code. For each test round, I did a composer update to get a
setup matching the used PHP version. The PHP versions are all installed directly on WSL2 Ubuntu 20 via the Ondrej PPA.
The test code
You can take a look at the test code (or try it yourself) at https://github.com/susannemoog/proj-euler - but please keep in mind the bulk of that code is 6 years old :-D
Results - Table View
Results show only the results with the greatest difference for brevity - the total time however is the complete run time of all tests.
| TEST (Time in ms) | PHP 5.6 | PHP 7.0 | PHP 7.1 | PHP 7.2 | PHP 7.3 | PHP 7.4 | PHP 8.0RC3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Run Time | 28.76s | 14.92s | 13.47s | 13.43s | 12.62s | 10.78s | 8.77s |
| DivisableTriangleNumber | 2555 | 1313 | 1299 | 1234 | 1130 | 1068 | 834 |
| LongestCollatzSequence | 1255 | 529 | 458 | 458 | 472 | 380 | 179 |
| AmicableNumbers | 89 | 52 | 43 | 42 | 39 | 42 | 27 |
| NameScores | 26 | 26 | 25 | 25 | 19 | 22 | 21 |
| NonAbundantNumbers | 2356 | 867 | 806 | 817 | 744 | 686 | 412 |
| QuadraticPrimes | 358 | 177 | 174 | 177 | 156 | 109 | 73 |
| CircularPrimes | 674 | 221 | 202 | 214 | 163 | 165 | 137 |
| DoubleBasePalindromes | 385 | 166 | 165 | 143 | 141 | 124 | 104 |
| TruncatablePrimes | 686 | 224 | 209 | 200 | 166 | 211 | 138 |
| LargestPalindromeProduct | 357 | 130 | 100 | 93 | 106 | 105 | 73 |
| PandigitalPrime | 522 | 162 | 140 | 135 | 109 | 98 | 106 |
| PentagonNumbers | 292 | 87 | 79 | 80 | 76 | 49 | 47 |
| FourDistinctPrimeFactors | 10537 | 5728 | 4821 | 4982 | 4747 | 3600 | 3077 |
| SmallestMultiple | 3185 | 1727 | 1606 | 1574 | 1490 | 1402 | 1090 |
| PrimeDigitReplacements | 177 | 105 | 94 | 96 | 87 | 75 | 61 |
| PermutedMultiples | 281 | 130 | 116 | 121 | 115 | 103 | 88 |
| CombinatoricSelections | 1226 | 1187 | 1094 | 1091 | 1077 | 1051 | 1067 |
Results - Graph
Conclusion
As you can see, the performance improvements happening over time are impressive and continuous; so today, I would probably have no problems solving the puzzles. Of course, it always depends a bit on your use case, but chances are good you'll profit at least a bit from every upgrade. If you are still stuck on an older PHP version and needed (another) argument to upgrade - here you go. ;)