[Thews]

It's been a while since I've seen anyone brag about PHP's speed.

PHP is quite slow at encoding and decoding JSON, very slow at any kind of tree data structure, and has among the highest memory usage of any language at printing a string of text to a console or otherwise.

Python is faster at all of those things and it's quite slow. Those are kind of web related tasks, and the web benchmarks for say django vs laravel don't show that PHP is any kind of winner.

[VectorLock]

If he think's CGI startup time is acceptable then I guess maybe PHP seems fast then?

[Thews]

My bigger issue with the CGI model is the lack of handling connections as streaming. You can't parse a file while it's still being uploaded, and that can eat up a lot of memory on larger files.

I know startup times can take a toll like establishing db connections, cache checking (like redis), file imports, etc. If you are using something that starts up for every request, then you have to be aware of those kinds of things and design around them.