Ah, I didn’t outline this very well in my post. I simply took a download of each version, and ran:

  • ./configure
  • make
  • /path/to/new/php/sapi/cli/php /path/to/new/php/Zend/bench.php

The final step was run 11 times so that I could ignore the first run and capture 10 attempts to average over. It’s pretty unscientific but I hope it gives an idea of the relative performance capabilities of each version.