[zmxz]

There are claims this is faster. It's not. I used it, together with other "alternative" runtimes which are just PHP command line interface long running scripts with some sort of task distribution balancer in front. Just like PHP-FPM is.

The apparent speedup comes from the fact it's not shared-nothing, meaning that objects from previous requests (and variables) are persisted and present in subsequent requests. This makes it work exactly like Node.js, removing the wonderful part of PHP which is that it automatically cleans up all the crap devs created and creates clean slate when next request is to be executed.

All of these "alternative" runtimes are false positives, because they're quick for first few requests but get slower and slower for the subsequent ones. Then, the workers are killed and restarted (precisely what PHP-FPM does too).

Since there's no new engine behind executing PHP, the only way FrankenPHP (and others) can yield any performance is when they're benchmarked against misconfigured PHP-FPM (opcache off, JIT off, persistent connections off).

It's not my cup of tea. I like that there are attempts at doing <something> but turning PHP execution model into Node.js execution model isn't the way to go.

I find it cheaper to throw a few bucks at stronger hardware compared to risking accurate execution to become flaky because shared-nothing is now unavailable.

[withinboredom]

The right answer, as always, is: "it depends." There's no definitive "faster" or "slower" anything and the claim is "up to" not "you will get."

Some workloads won't see any benefits, others will. While your anecdata might be useful, it is just that, an anecdote.

[zmxz]

It doesn't even depend. The underlying engine that executes opcodes is the same. Minimal speedup from not having to execute several "new objectname" commands isn't even a drop in the sea when it comes to what servers do.

I, for one, would love to be wrong about this and that FrankenPHP with all the other alternative runtimes actually brought benefits.