Regarding bootstrap time, have you tried cold PHP, like a cgi script or a PHP script run from shell? Not fast at all. I guess you are comparing PHP with mod_php

Regarding bootstrap time, have you tried cold PHP, like a cgi script or a PHP script run from shell? Not fast at all. I guess you are comparing PHP with mod_php (or something similar that already has a running interpreter in memory). In that case, it would be fair to compare it against something with JVM in memory, like Tomcat or Jetty.