It varies considerably. If you write the kind of simple PHP pages which gave it that reputation, it's almost always going to be limited by I/O. If you use a framework which encourages enterprise-style apps with hundreds of includes and object hierarchies which would make a J2EE developer weep, even the opcode cache won't be enough to get back to that spot. I don't follow it enough to see if this passing away niw but there was definitely a sizable chunk of the community which really thought that Real Programmers™ didn't write simple code.