How does PHP compare to other programming languages in terms of performance and speed?

PHP compares quite favorably to other common web programming languages in terms of performance and speed:

PHP is faster than interpreted languages like Ruby and Python since it compiles to opcode caches for native execution. This removes the interpolation penalty of interpreters.

The opcode caching and compilation to static assets provides significant performance gains over JavaScript on Node.js which requires constant client-server communication.

PHP handles concurrency well with its shared nothing architecture compared to threading in Java and .NET. Spinning new PHP processes is lightweight.

Built-in PHP functions for common web tasks are optimized for best performance unlike JavaScript.

JIT compilation in PHP 8 improves performance further compared to languages without JIT like Python.

PHP scales horizontally well across servers since each request is stateless by default unlike sticky sessions in Java and .NET.

Asynchronous programming support improves I/O intensive workload performance in modern PHP.

Frameworks like Swoole and ReactPHP allow non-blocking I/O PHP comparable to Node.js event loops.

Caching technologies like OPcache, Redis and Memcached optimize PHP apps beyond Java and .NET native caching.

Overall, real-world benchmarks show PHP 7.4 outperforming languages like Node.js, Python, Ruby, while being comparable to Java, Go and .NET for typical web workloads.

So in summary, PHP's compilation to native code, opcode caching, built-in optimizations and horizontal scaling allow it to rival and even surpass many other popular server-side languages for web-specific applications.