After mentioning George's URL to Rasmus, he mentioned that George's blog is full of spam and that I should do those test myself rather. So I did (Not because Rasmsus said it, but because I only believe what I see myself ;-) The results did definitely show that a statically compile PHP module is faster than a DSO module, though it heavily depends on the script on how much it matters. I tested three different applications, a Hello World script (which doesn't print "Hello World", the homepage of a phpMyAdmin installation and three different configurations of eZ publish .

The "Hello World" application shows the largest performance increase, likely because it is pure PHP code only. The script ran 28% percent faster, and the raw data for this test is here .

Both phpMyAdmin and eZ publish show an increase of little more than 10%, which is not the 30% that was mentioned before, but definitely a worthwhile increase, and it simply comes by running PHP as a static (or non-PIC) module in Apache. Now let's hope that Joe can commit his patch soon. Raw results are available too, for phpMyAdmin and eZ publish .