>benchmarks are sometimes bullshit, but the idea that node's approach is somehow light years ahead just doesn't pan out in the real world.

It's in the real world where you have database connections that can't always scale to 186k/second with low latency on all responses, which is what's required to get the performance out of HHVM in the linked benchmark. In a typical architecture you may not have the database local to the PHP server, meaning latency will be much higher. And it's upstream latency that kills a synchronous connection.

And it's in the real world where a number of third party queries may be involved with a request, and those queries may take 100ms to resolve, during which time your thread is blocked in PHP whereas Node can be busy handling other requests or even other aspects of the same request (a Promise.all of a half dozen simultaneous database queries, for instance).

Async approaches are light years ahead in the real world. I keep seeing references to HHVM when people try to defend PHP, so I did a Google search to find out if it supports async, and the answer is "a little bit." [1] Basically it looks like, within a single request, it can execute several queries in parallel, like my Promise.all example above. So it looks like Hack, at least, has that feature. But as far as I can tell it doesn't mix multiple connections in a single thread. And you have to be careful to use only async-aware operations or you lose the benefits; Node is designed around async behavior, so everything you're likely to use supports it by default.

Those benchmarks are in fact unrealistic. And the Node implementation in that benchmark uses a single connection to MySQL, so the 20 queries are actually executed in series instead of in parallel. [0] If they used a connection pool instead, they could all execute in parallel. Look at the numbers:

Queries 1 5 10 15 20
nodejs 85,490 22,917 12,083 8,250 6,254
hhvm 12,369 12,428 10,056 10,394 9,322

The NodeJS results shouldn't drop that fast off of the single query unless they're all using the same MySQL connection; even using just 4 connections from a pool should speed it up by a lot. Also, the HHVM source uses stored procedures while the Node version recompiles the query every time. Finally, Node can be faster when driven from Nginx, while it's using the internal Node server instead.

Here's an article I just stumbled across that talks about the limits of HHVM to accelerate PHP: [2] It touches on some of the same points. Async is the important way to speed up real world apps, and it's not the default "PHP Way."

Aside from that, probably 90% of the people using PHP are using it "normal" PHP on a hosted server in Apache and not HHVM at all. So you're basically arguing hypotheticals: "IF they use HHVM, and IF they write the code exactly right, and IF their upstream servers have really low latency all the time, then PHP isn't much slower than Node."

Node is usually faster in the real world given common coding patterns. And Node gives you Socket.IO, which pretty much kills the relevance of PHP no matter how you slice it. Even long polling would slaughter a PHP server; you'd be able to support at most one concurrent user per thread. Async servers are a good at supporting long running connections.

[0] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

[1] https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/async/introduction

[2] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2948132/app-servers/hhvm-38...