LSAPI 6.8 officially released to support PHP 7

PHP 7 Alpha 1 was released yesterday, marking the beginning of the PHP 7 major series, though the GA version is scheduled to be released by the end of 2015.  PHP 7 has improved performance, up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6, and consistent 64-bit support. “2015 is shaping up to be an amazing year for PHP. You’ll not only benefit from a whole slew of new features but also from performance going through the roof!” promises the PHP team. Quite exciting, isn’t it?

You can check the new features on their offical site: http://www.zend.com/en/resources/php-7

Although it is still in the Alpha 1 stage and not yet recommended for production, LiteSpeeders did not want to wait any longer to test and experience this amazing PHP advancement as soon as possible after spending many years with PHP 5.x. They approached us with numerous questions, but the main question was, “how can I test it?”. Don’t worry; we promise you peace of mind. The LiteSpeed Development Team always preemptively thinks, plans, and takes action on these big changes, just as we did for HTTP/2.

As many of you may know, LiteSpeed does not use php-fpm or fastcgi to communicate with the PHP engine by default, using LSAPI (LiteSpeed Server Application Programming Interface) instead.  LSAPI is designed specifically for seamless, optimized communication between LiteSpeed Web Server and third party web applications, including PHP. It serves PHP up to 20% faster than FastCGI, 50% faster than Apache with mod_PHP, and 75% faster than NGINX with PHP-FPM. This is one of the reasons why LiteSpeed stands out when compared to all other web servers.

Our development team has an excellent relationship with the PHP development team and worked very closely with them during the PHP 7 development process. We had previously updated LSAPI to add PHP 7 support and the new LSAPI code has been included in the PHP 7 main branch for some time now. You can simply download and compile PHP with “--with-litespeed” to make the lsphp binary without any patching.

With PHP 7’s Alpha 1 release, we felt it was time for us to make this formal announcement that our new version of LSAPI 6.8 with added PHP 7 support is ready. Installation wiki and PHP 7 RPMs will be available very soon. Please check back for this update.

The race between PHP 7 and HHVM has already started. HHVM had previously been winning the game over PHP 5.x, but how about now? The LiteSpeed Engineering Team has run a series of intensive performance benchmark tests with PHP 7, HHVM, and PHP 5.6 on a “hello world” script and a wordpress demo page. We will publish these benchmark results very soon. A series of other test scenarios have also been planned. Results will be added to this PHP 7/HHVM benchmark series as soon as they are available.

PHP 7 vs. HHVM, who will finally win this competition? We will see.