[Nican]

The answer here is non-trivial. I have since long stopped developing with PHP, but PHP has several run modes (And multiple runtimes like HHVM), that may bring different performance and concurrency characteristics.

Last I remember, PHP still runs all inside of a single process, so it still all share the same memory space, and it no longer has the overhead of starting a new process with every request.

The piece of engineering that made node.js so fast back in the day was Libuv, which allowed for non-blocking IO, greatly reducing the number of system calls/context switches.

But I am also going to guess that PHP developers have since caught on to the performance optimizations of non-blocking IO, and integrated the improvements into the runtime. Doing a quick search for "php vs nodejs benchmark" on Google [1], it seems like the performance of Nodejs is comparable to that of HHVM.

So as usual, use the right tool for the job. This is more of a problem of using your tooling correctly, more than choosing the correct language.

[1] https://yuiltripathee.medium.com/node-js-vs-php-comparison-g...

[onlypositive]

I used PHP but probably should have specified modphp or phpfpm.