I am not sure people are getting these results with PHP and FTP. Sure, the build time is zero seconds. But each page load takes 100ms because it's doing the same work over and over for every request. Yes, even if you cache opcodes. We have a legacy PHP app and an "echo hello world" request takes 100ms. An extremely complicated request then takes 102ms to process. It is shockingly slow, but it is not something you will notice unless you have a lot of instrumentation, so you might be lead to believe that your performance woes are caused by something else.