Quite slow compared to what? PHP was popular when it had MySQL bindings that were always up to date with MySQL changes and apache PHP setup was simplistic. Thu

Quite slow compared to what? PHP was popular when it had MySQL bindings that were always up to date with MySQL changes and apache PHP setup was simplistic. Thus the LAMP stack, right? It has always been rather fast, in the larger ecosystem of web scripting languages (especially if you avoided particular BIFs) but it got a LOT faster in 7 as the slowest bits were optimized alongside everything else.