---
title: 'PHP 8.4 vs 8.3 vs 8.2 Performance: Does every upgrade get faster?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=GzWtMtlOfQM'
video_id: 'GzWtMtlOfQM'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 382
---

# PHP 8.4 vs 8.3 vs 8.2 Performance: Does every upgrade get faster?

> Source: [PHP 8.4 vs 8.3 vs 8.2 Performance: Does every upgrade get faster?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=GzWtMtlOfQM)

## Summary

This video presents benchmark results comparing PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 performance across Symfony, Laravel, and WordPress. The key finding is that upgrading between PHP 8.x versions yields no noticeable performance gain, contrary to some earlier benchmarks.

### Key Points

- **Motivation for Benchmark** [0:00] — The creator wondered if upgrading PHP versions automatically improves performance, leading to a benchmark by Tideways.
- **Main Result: No Performance Gain** [0:22] — Upgrading to PHP 8.4 does not magically increase performance; PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 have virtually the same performance.
- **Contradiction with Previous Benchmarks** [0:53] — Earlier benchmarks showed small improvements between versions, but Tideways could not replicate those results.
- **Benchmark Methodology** [1:18] — Two test scenarios: fixed requests measuring response times, and maximum requests measuring requests per second, each run for 60 seconds with warm-up.
- **Frameworks Tested** [1:45] — Symfony, Laravel, and WordPress demo applications were used.
- **Symfony Results** [2:10] — Response times and requests per second were virtually identical across PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4.
- **Laravel Results** [2:50] — Laravel showed no performance difference across PHP versions, achieving ~1020 requests per second.
- **WordPress Results** [3:26] — WordPress showed a slight improvement from PHP 7.4 to 8.x (about 5% more requests per second), but no change within PHP 8.x.
- **Future of PHP Performance** [4:58] — Zend VM may be at its limit; improvements may come from using modern APIs (e.g., DOM HTML5, sprintf) rather than version upgrades.

### Conclusion

Upgrading PHP within the 8.x series does not improve performance; instead, focus on application architecture, code, and algorithms for performance gains.

## Transcript

With every new release of PHP, you
probably ask yourself, is there an
automatic gain in performance just by
upgrading? This is what I asked myself
when PHP 8.4 came out and put my team at
Tideways to work on a benchmark to
answer once and for all. The results are
now published on our blog, and I want to
discuss them in this video. The main
result, upgrading to PHP 8.4 four will
not magically increase the performance
of your PHP application to noticeably
better
levels. In fact, our benchmarks show
that during the PHP8 series, not a
single release improved the performance
noticeably. That means PHP 8.4, 8.3, 8.2
are almost virtually the same
performance. This was quite a surprise
to me. The reason is that previous
benchmarks by others showed that there
was a noticeable small improvement
across uh the different
versions. Specifically, this uh PHP
benchmarks post that was widely cited
across the community showed increases of
a few% between uh the different PHP 8.1,
8.2, and 8.3 versions.
In our benchmark, we were not able to
replicate these improvements. For our
benchmark, we set up two test scenarios
that each ran for 60 seconds, including
warm-up periods. First, we measured the
response times by sending a fixed number
of
requests. Second, we measured the
requests per second by sending as many
requests as possible during the time
period.
We did this against three widely spread
frameworks. A Symfony demo application,
a Laravel demo application, and a
WordPress demo application. You can find
more details on our methodology on the
blog post, including the code to set up
the benchmarks, uh the specifications of
the machine we used and the versions of
all the different software that we
benchmarked against. Let's look at the
results starting with
Symfony. As you can see, for the tests
sending 100 requests per second, the
response times across the versions PHP
8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 did not noticeably
change. The average median 95, and 99
percentile are virtually the same.
Looking at the test with 15 concurrent
users attempting to send as many
requests as possible, we also see that
for PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4, for the
number of requests is almost the same at
538. We see the similar results for the
Laravel demo application across PHP 8.2
to 8.4 for all the metrics average
median 195 and 99 percentile. The
response times are almost the same
signaling that the performance did not
really change for the test sending as
many requests as possible for 60
seconds. The Laravel demo application
achieved around 1,020 requests per
second regardless of the PHP version
8.2, 8.3 or 8.4. So the performance here
again almost the
same. We also picked WordPress because
it's possible to install it on such a
wide range of PHP versions that we are
able to test it from PHP 7.4 to
8.4. Again, throughout the PHP8 series,
there's not really a visible change in
performance. However, from PHP 7.4, it
seems the performance increased slightly
to
PHP8. We can see this here that the
response times for 100 requests per
second slightly decreased by a few
milliseconds from uh PHP 7.4 to uh 8.2
and following versions.
This change is much more visible for the
scenario where we send 15 concurrent
users to uh perform as many requests as
possible for 60 seconds. For PHP 7.4,
the WordPress installation achieved 206
requests per second and a 5% roughly 5%
higher number for all the PHP 8.2, 8.3,
and 8.4 four versions with around 220
requests. This at least shows that there
is some improvement from PHP 7 to PHP 8,
but it also cements that the performance
in P the PHP8 series really didn't
change a lot just by upgrading the
version. With these results, I ask
myself what the future for PHP
performance holds.
First, the Zen virtual machine seems to
be at the end of the potential
improvements that we see. The next
versions will not radically increase the
performance anymore. Second, we can see
improvements in specific PHP APIs across
the latest versions. So, for example,
the new DOM document HTML 5 support has
a lot of performance improvements. We
have the sprintf improvements and also
improvements to various APIs and
functions. So if you want to invest some
time in your application, you can
improve it the performance by using more
modern and faster
APIs. Third, we haven't really seen much
performance improvements by the just in
time compiler that uh PHP now has for
web applications. the performance
difference is really not measurable and
we will see if there's maybe an
improvement to the uh JIT in the future
that will level up the performance of
PHP to a new level. In conclusion, your
application architecture, code, and
algorithms are probably the most
important puzzle piece in improving the
performance of your application going
forward. You can find a few ideas on how
to improve PHP performance on this
YouTube channel, and we'll add a new
video every week. Don't miss out by
subscribing to this channel. See you
around. Bye.