Is PHP 7.3 faster than PHP 7.2? Should I use PHP 7.3 for my WordPress site? We have done our own performance testing for WordPress running with WooCommerce and benchmarked PHP 7.2 against PHP 7.3.
We installed a standard WordPress 5.0 with the Storefront theme and imported the 50 products supplied by WooCommerce as sample data on a standard Servebolt High-Performance plan.
We wanted to test whether PHP 7.3 was performing better than PHP 7.2, and therefore bypassed the reverse proxy and ran tests directly against the backend web server running the PHP, effectively bypassing all caching. The tests were run from the server to eliminate network bias.
We used ab as the testing tool, running 3.000 requests with a concurrency of 1000, with keep alive enabled.
ab -k -n 3000 -c 30 -H "Host: phpben-4836.bolt57.servebolt.com" http://phpben-4836.bolt57.servebolt.com:8000/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1826891 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking phpben-4836.bolt57.servebolt.com (be patient)
Completed 300 requests
Completed 600 requests
Completed 900 requests
Completed 1200 requests
Completed 1500 requests
Completed 1800 requests
Completed 2100 requests
Completed 2400 requests
Completed 2700 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Finished 3000 requests
Server Software: Apache/2.4
Server Hostname: phpben-4836.bolt57.servebolt.com
Server Port: 8000
Document Path: /
Document Length: 64366 bytes
Concurrency Level: 30
Time taken for tests: 13.601 seconds
Complete requests: 3000
Failed requests: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 193950000 bytes
HTML transferred: 193098000 bytes
Requests per second: 220.58 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 136.007 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.534 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 13926.03 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.1 0 1
Processing: 102 135 7.9 137 157
Waiting: 21 31 3.0 32 44
Total: 102 135 7.9 137 157
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 137
66% 139
75% 141
80% 142
90% 144
95% 145
98% 147
99% 148
100% 157 (longest request)
We ran this test 3 times on PHP 7.2 and three times on PHP 7.3 and compared the numbers.
PHP 7.2 Average: 192 requests per second
PHP 7.3 Average: 224 requests per second
The results were consistent with very small variations. WordPress with WooCommerce running PHP 7.3 outperforms PHP 7.2 by 16.67%.
So what are you waiting for? It is time to get that extra performance boost. Upgrade your site to PHP 7.3 compatible today, and get a 10-17% extra performance boost!
Benchmarks from PHP 5.6 and up
We did a few more compiles of PHP 7.3 and tested and benchmarked those. We also did benchmarks on all major versions from 5.6 and up. See the results in the table below.
PHP only
| Req/s | PHP 5.6 | PHP 7.0 | PHP 7.1 | PHP 7.2 | PHP 7.3 | PHP 7.3 v2 | PHP 7.3 v3 | |
| PHP 5.6 | 401 | |||||||
| PHP 7.0 | 761 | 189.78% | ||||||
| PHP 7.1 | 809 | 201.75% | 106.31% | |||||
| PHP 7.2 | 826 | 206.07% | 108.59% | 102.14% | ||||
| PHP 7.3 | 926 | 230.92% | 121.68% | 114.46% | 112.06% | |||
| 7.3 v2 | 960 | 239.40% | 126.15% | 118.67% | 116.18% | 103.67% | ||
| 7.3 v3 | 972 | 242.39% | 127.73% | 120.15% | 117.63% | 104.97% | 101.25% | |
| 7.3 FINAL | 980 | 244.39% | 128.78% | 121.14% | 118.60% | 105.83% | 102.08% | 100.82% |
PHP and Database
| Req/s | PHP 5.6 | PHP 7.0 | PHP 7.1 | PHP 7.2 | PHP 7.3 | PHP 7.3 v2 | PHP 7.3 v3 | |
| PHP 5.6 | 74 | |||||||
| PHP 7.0 | 177 | 239.19% | ||||||
| PHP 7.1 | 183 | 247.30% | 103.39% | |||||
| PHP 7.2 | 192 | 259.46% | 108.47% | 104.92% | ||||
| PHP 7.3 | 221 | 298.65% | 124.86% | 120.77% | 115.10% | |||
| 7.3 v2 | 221 | 298.65% | 124.86% | 120.77% | 115.10% | 100.00% | ||
| 7.3 v3 | 223 | 301.35% | 125.99% | 121.86% | 116.15% | 100.90% | 100.90% | |
| 7.3 FINAL | 224 | 302.70% | 126.55% | 122.40% | 116.67% | 101.36% | 101.36% | 100.45% |
