[jcampbell1]

> Is it really faster than CPython like for like?

It is a mixed bag. There are times where PHP is faster because it is closer to C, where as more python is written in Python. I once ran into a situation where it mattered that PHP's file_exists() is much faster than python's os.path.exists(). I have run into other cases where CPython is much better, such as python's heapq crushes a hand rolled PHP priority queue.

In practice PHP tends to be quite fast, because the standard solutions are pretty unambitious like thin wrappers around CURL, rather than actually implementing HTTP in php.

[bch]

> pretty unambitious like thin wrappers around CURL

That (specific example) sounds incredibly intelligent to me.