True, and HHVM is awesome.

Where Node.js shines is Web Sockets and similar things. But one can use libevent with PHP (though not as easy).

I found some useful comparision benchmarks on that site: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=i7...

Do you know of a way to use libevent to make concurrent queries to mysql? Or mysqli to do this? I mean hitting MULTIPLE database servers / shards.

That would speed up my php by a lot. I an cache results of queries in PHP but can't batch things together before they are sent. In JS I can wait for 50msec to do requests in batches. That lets higher lawyers (ViewModels) query the model without worrying about batching!

IO related PHP API are a problem, one needs non-blocking functions for optimal performance.

Sorry, as HHVM doesn't expose libevent yet (at least last asked the devs on IRC), I moved some portions of my code to node.js for now. (plus HHVM relies itself on the older libevent 1.4, instead of the 2.x that PHP exposes as API)

I would be interested in the answer too. Maybe ask it on stackoverflow.com or so?