It&#x27;s actually faster. My company was able to cut a lot of servers just by upgrading. And you can find a lot of testimonials around reddit and twitter. Best thing to do is not to trust me, or this horrendous benchmark suite, and test it yourself.<p>That&#x27;s why I loathe TechEmpower&#x27;s benchmark, or any similar service trying to benchmark the world. It&#x27;s very misleading and error prone by nature. It&#x27;s not like you&#x27;re comparing two GPU cards doing the same thing.<p>Take PHP for example, one of the most popular frameworks is using version 4.2 (latest is 5.2, and there&#x27;s also a LTS release). It was released in June, 2014 and it&#x27;s before several major architecture changes and refactoring. And they&#x27;ll probably say it&#x27;s my fault for not contributing.