PHP7 Reference

PHP7 Reference – An overview of the features, changes, and backward compatibility breakages in PHP 7

Unarguably the greatest part about PHP 7 is the incredible performance boosts it provides to applications. This is a result of refactoring the Zend Engine to use more compact data structures and less heap allocations/deallocations.

The performance gains on real world applications will vary, though many applications seem to recieve a ~100% performance boost – with lower memory consumption too!

The refactored codebase provides further opportunities for future optimisations as well (such as JIT compilation). So it looks like future PHP versions will continue to see performance enhancements too.

4 thoughts on “PHP7 Reference”


  1. As of PHP7 Beta 1 the memory consumption is VERY much higher than in 5.6. A very simple page (phpinfo()) uses 2048 KB and the same goes for a more complex (OOP+ Smarty templates) based CMS one.

    In 5.6 the simple one uses 256 KB and the complex one 768 KB. In both cases OPCache is on and the configuration is identical.

    So it seems to me that the minimum amount of memory consumed is 2MB. Hope this changes to more rational figures in the future.

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