How PHP 8’s JIT Boosts Performance: Benchmark Insights from Phoronix

Foreign tech media Phoronix published a performance benchmark report for PHP 8. Because the official PHP 8 Alpha 1 is not expected until mid‑June, Phoronix built a test version from the latest PHP 8 Git source (as of the end of May). PHP 8 introduces a new JIT compiler, static return types, union types 2.0, and attributes.

The versions used for comparison are PHP 7.4.6, 7.3.18, 7.2.31, 7.1.33, 7.0.33, 5.6.39, 5.5.38, 5.4.44, and PHP 8 with JIT enabled.

All tested versions were built on the same system with identical compilers and PHP configuration files. The test environment is shown below:

The benchmark results are as follows:

Using PHPBench, the performance from PHP 7.4 stable to PHP 8 shows a modest improvement of about 7%. When JIT is enabled in PHP 8, the improvement is striking—approximately a 92% boost over PHP 7.4 stable. Compared with the oldest PHP 5.4, PHP 8 with JIT is five times faster.

Micro‑benchmarks of various PHP built‑in tests show PHP 8.0 is slightly faster than the already fast PHP 7.4, and enabling JIT makes it dominate the field.

When testing with Phoronix Test Suite Self Tests, PHP 8’s performance, whether JIT is enabled or not, does not show a clear advantage over PHP 7 because of I/O bottlenecks, resulting in limited overall differences.

In rendering and merge tests, enabling JIT in PHP 8 does not produce a noticeable advantage, but compared with old PHP 5 versions, PHP 8’s performance is significantly higher.

The aggregated scores across all tests indicate that PHP 8.0 runs roughly three times faster than PHP 5.4‑5.6, and with JIT enabled the gap widens to about four times.

Overall, the data suggest PHP 8.0 is a highly anticipated release, offering notable performance gains and new language features.

For detailed test results, visit https://www.phoronix.com .