Note that the theregister.co.uk link points back to ircmaxell's blog.
The SO link is for an answer from 2009, pointing to an email from 2006.
ircmaxell's blog is spot on - if you actually bother to read what it says. Not keeping a very important part of a webserver up to date with security releases is insecure. Is that a surprise to you, or anyone?
Is Windows or OSX or Linux insecure because they have security patches coming out all the time? What's insecure is user behavior when they keep running old, unpatched versions of software.
You're spreading FUD, repeating words and showing links without actually taking the time to understand the message they are trying to convey.
Case in point: PHP being "heavy". A PHP app can be as lightweight or as heavy as you need it to be. The more you build and the more it does, the "heavier" it becomes. If you throw a proper caching solution at a codebase, it becomes much better, but this is true for anything.
Look at the TechEmpower Benchmarks [0] - PHP raw is usually towards the middle, upper-middle of the pack. Of course, it gets handily beaten by compiled and multi-threaded languages.
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/31/want_to_have_your_se...
- "Over 78% of PHP installs are insecure" - http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/php-install-statistics.htm...
- http://stackoverflow.com/a/1567392