[astrodust]

Compared to Ruby, sure, but pretty much everything is at this point. Compared to Node JavaScript? Not even close.

They've made some impressive gains in PHP7 that others should take note of. Ruby's particularly out of shape here compared to the competition, though Python isn't exactly a speed demon either.

[exclusiv]

Yes it is comparable to Node. Most benchmarks show PHP with blocking calls against async Node calls. PHP has the tools to do async no problem. I use ReactPHP all the time to do this stuff; it works great for fast scraping.

See an older counter-point with the much slower PHP 5.5:

https://philsturgeon.uk/php/2013/11/12/benchmarking-codswall...