PHP on glibc (on Debian bookworm) versus musl (on Alpine 3.19, musl 1.2.4). We use slightly modified php containers: https://github.com/arnaud-lb/docker-php/tree/musl-benchmark (non-stripped php, added apache-zts variant).
Running Symfony Demo (/blog/en/) with php-cgi -T10,50. 10 warmup requests, 50 measured requests, executed 5 times. We measure the mean of the total time taken by the 50 requests.
Opcache is enabled and Symfony is in production mode.
Non-ZTS (lower is better) :
- bookworm: php:8.3-bookworm-dbgsym php-cgi
- alpine: php:8.3-alpine3.19-dbgsym php-cgi
- alpine-mimalloc: php:8.3-alpine3.19-dbgsym env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libmimalloc.so.2 php-cgi
- alpine-jemalloc: php:8.3-alpine3.19-dbgsym env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libjemalloc.so.2 php-cgi
bookworm: mean: 0.5663; stddev: 0.0013; diff: -0.00%
alpine: mean: 0.6509; stddev: 0.0029; diff: +14.93%
alpine-mimalloc: mean: 0.6337; stddev: 0.0021; diff: +11.89%
alpine-jemalloc: mean: 0.6335; stddev: 0.0008; diff: +11.86%
ZTS (lower is better) :
- bookworm-zts: php:8.3-bookworm-zts-dbgsym php-cgi
- alpine-zts: php:8.3-alpine3.19-zts-dbgsym php-cgi
bookworm-zts: mean: 0.6069; stddev: 0.0034; diff: +0.00%
alpine-zts: mean: 0.7075; stddev: 0.0026; diff: +16.57%
Running Symfony Demo (/blog/en/) in mod_php ZTS, with ab -n 20000 -c 100 (lower is better) :
bookworm: 0.849000; +0.00%
alpine: 0.995000; +17.20%
alpine-mimalloc: 0.991000; +16.73%
alpine-jemalloc: 0.980000; +15.43%
Running the frankenphp-demo, slightly modified (frankenphp, frankenphp-demo), with k6 run --insecure-skip-tls-verify -u 100 -d 30s script.js:
bookworm:
Metric Count Rate Average Maximum Median Minimum 90th_Percentile 95th_Percentile
http_req_duration - - 70.57 1058.36 63.70 6.34 98.91 102.74
alpine:
Metric Count Rate Average Maximum Median Minimum 90th_Percentile 95th_Percentile
http_req_duration - - 98.52 529.25 90.75 4.90 124.51 127.77
alpine-jemalloc:
Metric Count Rate Average Maximum Median Minimum 90th_Percentile 95th_Percentile
http_req_duration - - 101.94 885.45 97.48 6.70 125.27 128.50
PHP under musl is ~15% slower. Using mimalloc or jemalloc under musl is slightly less slow.
perf shows no low hanging fruits. memcpy takes considerably more time in musl than in glic builds (10% in musl builds).
The benchmark can be reproduced by using the linked repositories.
Executed on Intel i9-12900KS, turbo disabled, randomize_va_space disabled:
sudo sh -c '
for f in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor; do echo performance > "$f"; done
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space
'
docker-php containers are built with docker build -t php:8.3-... in subdirectories: https://github.com/arnaud-lb/docker-php/tree/musl-benchmark/8.3, e.g.:
cd docker-php/8.3/$os/cli && docker build -t php:8.3-$os-cli .
apache-zts containers were started with
docroot=/var/www/html # or /var/www/localhost/htdocs for alpine
docker run -v "$(pwd)/symfony-demo:$docroot" -d --name musl-bench-apache-zts php:8.3-bookworm-apache-zts-dbgsym
frankenphp containers are built with PHP_VERSION=8.3 docker buildx bake --load --set '*.platform=linux/amd64' default in https://github.com/arnaud-lb/frankenphp/tree/musl-benchmark, and started with
docker run \
-e FRANKENPHP_CONFIG="worker ./public/index.php" \
-v $PWD:/app \
-p 80:80 -p 443:443/tcp -p 443:443/udp \
--name FrankenPHP-demo \
dunglas/frankenphp
LD_PRELOAD is used to enable mimalloc or jemalloc in specified benchmarks.