One day I looked at a presentation about the upcoming PHP 5.4.0. I just stared at the slide 3 when I saw the numbers for performance and memory usage improvements. I said to myself: I have to make a test. I downloaded PHP 5.4.0alpha2, run “.configure” with mysql options and “make” and started the php cli command. And a mysql error popped up.

Today I looked at qa.php.net and a beta version was available. I ran the commands again and this time it worked. This are the results I got testing a rather complex (lots of posts and plugins) WordPress blog:

For me it’s quite impressive. Script was executed in 25% less time and PHP process used 43% less memory. I can’t wait to install this on my production server, because waiting a half a second to generate a page (for my current configuration) is a little excessive.