100% not shocked at all. I recall a couple of times over the past 15-20 years where a current python significantly outperformed a current php version, but my r

100% not shocked at all. I recall a couple of times over the past 15-20 years where a current python significantly outperformed a current php version, but my recollection is that php was usually a bit faster, or sometimes a lot faster. PHP 7 was released on dec 2015, and gained significant speed bumps and better memory usage, with the average php execution time being cut in half, or more, generally without any code change whatsoever. It was quite remarkable. The path from 7.x-8.1 so far has generally seen incremental speed bumps again - usually somewhere between 3-8% improvements per release. Obviously this is going to be dependent on use cases, but overall it's been a fairly steady set of speed improvements over the last 7 years.