View http://blog.asmallorange.com/2013/08/php-roadmap-performance/
Most of us (e.g. Monday By Noon readers) are still slinging PHP so I’m hoping the bulk of you find this as interesting as I do. I’ve been a customer at A Small Orange for a while now, but that’s not the reason I’m linking here, I just love that they’re doing their part in educating their customers about changes going on. PHP is an exciting project not only because of it’s prevalence but also because of the changes being made from version to version. I’m always interested in hearing what’s going on with the next version, even though it rarely affects me directly. I tend to stick with WordPress’ minimum requirements for all of my code which limits me from taking advantage of some core PHP improvements, but that’s okay, as is outlined in this post.
Even if you’re not taking advantage of the new code features of PHP, you can still sit back and enjoy the massive performance improvements that come along with them. I knew PHP got better over the past few major iterations, but these graphs really show that well.