Bitcoin miners want their newly-found blocks to propagate across the network as quickly as possible, because every millisecond of delay increases the chances that another block, found at about the same time, wins the "block race."
Zeev Suraski (Zend CTO) recently released some benchmarking figures comparing HHVM to PHPNG (and PHP 5.6). I was particularly interested in the results for SugarCRM. They show a 14-28% speed benefit in favor of PHPNG. I decided to investigate, and ran some basic benchmarks with siege.
It came up with the following results:
| Trans/sec | |
|---|---|
| PHPNG | 24.12 |
| HHVM | 20.74 |
| Diff. | 16.29% |