"Instead PHP is faster for the things websites normally do, like string manipulation."
No, this is not right for a couple of reasons. NodeJS is potentially slower in certain CPU-bound tasks due to the single-threaded nature of JavaScript.
On the other hand, thanks to its event loop and concurrency model, NodeJS is much faster than many languages/runtimes in I/O (reading/writing to stores, fetching data from other servers, etc.) - which is what many web servers do most.
Your original comment also mentioned:
"in-browser execution has seen most of the speedup (as it's where most of the optimisation is focussed on)."
Which is also not true. The V8 engine is hyperoptimized and runs not only Chrome but Node too. It is precisely one of the reasons why server-side JS has gained in popularity over the last decade. The fact that it was initially devised for a browser environment does not mean that optimisation is focused there.
If you're an engineer or web developer I really suggest that you brush up on these things, because with comments like the ones you've been dropping you'd definitely raise eyebrows - and not for the good...
It is certainly true that NodeJS has become much faster as your synthetic benchmarks shows, however we have to measure our programs in the context of intended use, as previous poster suggested.
NodeJS wins against PHP when NodeJS does not make an external database call, like in the two test suites JSON serialization and Plaintext, but as soon as you throw in MySQL database PHP wins.
What does this tells us? That V8, the implementation of the JavaScript, is faster than the Zend engine, the implementation of PHP, but the event based NodeJS platform is not faster than the PHP(Apache/Nginx) platform.
NodeJS performance has evolved massively thanks to V8 R&D, as you already mentioned, Zend Engine has also gained a lot performance but of course not comparable to V8 for obvious reasons, the prior is a Google based project, the latter is a volunteer community based project. However the PHP stack also consist of a web server, and they has also evolved massively the past 20 years, Nginx is relatively new on the scene with an event based asynchronous architecture and Apache has evolved with a new PHP module.
I think your personal attacks against muglug, regardless if he was right or wrong, is not appropriate for this forum, especially when you yourself is not entirely up to date.
> If you're an engineer or web developer I really suggest that you brush up on these things
I’m doing ok, thanks, and a little humility would go a long way :)
I work at a company where we run PHP as both a shared-memory server and also in a more traditional per-request model, both serving millions of requests a day. Separately I’ve created (and maintain) a 200-thousand-line multi-threaded PHP application with over 4 million downloads. I’m reasonably aware of PHP’s performance characteristics.
I’m less up-to-date on Node, admittedly, but it also intuitively makes sense that the V8 engine will be optimised more for in-browser use than serverside use.
Instead PHP is faster for the things websites normally do, like string manipulation.