Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

I was having a discussion with a friend last night about this topic. Unfortunately, he could not explain to me in an understandable manner how this really works...I guess the fact that he used very technical terminologies :erm: did not help at all. Could someone please be kind enough and explain this to me in a beginner friendly language :D :D

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

PHP 7 will not speed up your internet connection in any way but what it will do is allow 2x faster performance for apps, not because your internet has got faster but that the app responds quicker.

Your speed will remain what it is, what you connect to and use may respond quicker due to less overhaeads.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

As Pip says, it wont speed up the "internet", but it does allow sites themselves to run a little bit faster (not always noticable of course) so page load may be quicker.

Cable Forum now runs on PHP7, but since we were fast before, the difference isnt really likely to be noticed by most.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

OK so the thing with php is that it isn't a webpage, it is a script that produces a webpage.

When you ask for a php page:
Step 1: your web browser connects to the server, it asks for the php page.
Step 2: Your web browser then waits while the server runs the php script (time depends on how faster the server is).
Step 3: The server then sends the resulting page (time depends on the speed of your internet connection).
Step 4: Your web browsers draws it on your screen (speed of your computer).

Speeding up the php will only speed up stage 2 where the server is preparing your page.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

How prevalent is PHP these days anyway? Seems to be taken over by a multitude of frameworks.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Its still very much prevalent.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Fair enough. I imagine WordPress is a big example of it too. Does PHP heavily leverage other frameworks at this point?

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Well framed. I would love to hear a clarification on this as well...whether PHP heavily leverages other frameworks at this point?

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

I would love to hear a clarification of what Damian's question actually means :spin:

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

When you design websites you typically employ a framework which is basically a code library that does the complicated bits for you. Damien is asking how many of these frameworks are built using php these days.

Wordpress is a bloging frramework for instance.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

If PHP is a language a framework is a set of existing code and structures that you can use to make development quicker rather than doing everything from scratch.

Yeah. I kind of thought that PHP has been taken over server side by things like Ruby, Node and so on. I assume that most large PHP applications are now commonly started against another framework? The PHP I remember would need such a thing to still be used for large web applications.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Ruby is older than php, and not really very common. I have no idea what Node is.

There are a few php "frameworks" around, Zend is probably the most common.

A framework is really just a collection of pre-written functionality to save you having to write it yourself (e.g. for database operations).

They are ok for big projects to save time writing a lot of functions, but somewhat overkill for most websites as they have a ton of code you will just never use.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Yeah I was thinking of web applications more than sites.

Node is a server-side javascript web development framework.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

So the answer is that it only speeds up certain things like apps and is a sort of code that can be used to make sites/frameworks work better without actually having to write out all the coding and scripts. It's all the other stuff that slows down the internet.Have I got the gist of it?:dunce:

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

"You may receive a faster user experience using certain sites." Is the most correct way I can think of saying it.

But to say it speeds up the internet is too broad.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Yep, thats about the size of it.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Well, all the existing literature seems to bear out that it is faster than 5.x. Apparently, anyone accustomed to PHP 5 will notice the steep improvements made for PHP 7. PHP 7 directly interprets and executes code on the server using the standard PHP interpreter, which is free for everyone. Anyone who is a beginner at this, i stumbled upon this https://www.1and1.co.uk/digitalguide...-the-internet/ that summarises how PHP7 speeds up the internet. I found the language used easy to read and not too technical.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

I think steep improvements is over stating it somewhat, though of course it depends on how fast the site is on php 5. It also depends on the use of the opcache, something that article fails to mention at all.

The page generation values on CF are faster, but most people probably wont notice the difference as its less than a second faster in most cases - the speed of the connection, and how fast your browser renders the page, are more significant, and havent changed.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

PHP7 will have minimal effect on end users, pages will render quicker but in real times we are only talking about milliseconds.

No big deal.

Re: Does PHP7 really speed up the Internet??
 

Web developers/server admins who run huge websites with millions of visitors a day are the kind of people who would shout about the differences between PHP 5 and 7 speeds as if they mean something as it determines specs of machines or their cluster size.

For the average Jo, they won't notice the difference at all.

Using a car analogy...only a few people bother making a tweak to their cars to get an extra 2 or 3 bhp/break horse power and even less people will notice or appreciate that extra speed.

The moral of the story is web pages are cars or something.

It's a small part of the big picture. Say a site uses Node and loads that from a different website than the one you are visiting, that will likely make the page load faster than upgrading your php version. THat is why many websites grab many parts of a page from many domains and sub domains generally. Not many people would think of upgrading PHP to version 7 for the speed increase.