What is PHPNG?

PHPNG is a new branch of development that aims to bring a whole new level of performance and memory usage efficiency to PHP.

This branch was added somewhat secretly by Zend developers to the PHP development repository in April 16 but it was openly described only in May 5 when Sebastian Bergmann of the PHPUnit fame asked in the PHP internals about it.

Dmitry Stogov of Zend presented a more or less detailed description of the PHPNG branch. He explained that he has been experimenting using a JIT engine (Just In Time compilation to native machine code) using LLVM.

Using LLVM as a JIT for the Zend Engine was already proposed by Nuno Lopes in 2008. Some work was done with a student that was directed by Nuno Lopes as a Google Summer of Code project that resulted in the PECL LLVM extension. I have covered all possible PHP JIT solutions in an article about this topic in 2011.

The PHPNG branch also features improvements in the PHP memory management. According to Dmitry Stogov, the PHP execution takes a big part of the time dealing with memory allocations, and so that is an aspect that affects significantly PHP performance.

According to his tests the speed improvements of typical PHP applications are significant. For instance, he measured it and noticed that it can server 20% more requests per second when testing a Wordpress installation.

You cannot expect that all PHP applications will benefit from similar performance improvements because most of the time PHP is waiting for database or cache access operations to complete. Those operations will not benefit much from speed improvements in the execution of PHP, as PHP will be idle most of the time.