PHP 7 so much faster than PHP 5

Earlier this year, I decided to make the leap to PHP 7 prior to it officially becoming a part of my servers distribution (I run Ubuntu).

It has probably been the easiest and best change I have made to my personal server stack in a number of years.

Granted, it wasn’t without a few minor issues. In the custom PHP code I wrote for clients, I got a little lazy over the years and did not open my PHP code blocks with <?php … and still just had php.ini to allow that, but I decided to go through my custom code and add the

Switching to PHP 7 gave a very large advantage… The speed. It is substantially faster than PHP 5. I ran benchmarks on my 1GB linode before and after the switch and PHP 7 literally doubled the speed of code execution.

Here are my basic server specs on most of my servers. There are minor variations.

Linode 1GB VPS
Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
MySQL 5.5.50-38.0 Percona Server
Nginx 1.4.6
PHP 7.0.9-1 (FPM)

Along with the PHP 7 switch, moving from the unmaintained Cherokee web server to Nginx as well as adding WP-Supercache to *all* my WordPress sites, the speed increase is VERY notable. Almost like I’m using a CDN when I am not. 

Between my three primary servers, I am running 53, 43 and 37 sites on each. Probably 75% WordPress, 25% Static HTML bootstrap type sites. CPU load times are never greater that 1.0 and usage rarely exceeds 5-10% (Primarily thanks to WP-Supercache).