It’s not about a benchmark. PHP-FPM executes your .php file from the beginning every time, so it does require(…) all the classes etc. and then proceeds to load the configuration from files etc.

A good framework can maybe cache some of this with the opcode cache, and apcu. Saving some milliseconds.

But regardless of all this, each worker process takes up a lot of memory (the entire framework, etc) which is often megabytes. By contrast, the Qbix webserver forks after you have loaded the classes. Being written in PHP actually gives it an advantage — the workers become much smaller and you can run 100x of them.

This accomplishes what no other PHP webserver has managed to do: give you the speed of Swoole / FrankenPHP while at the samw time let you run unmodified PHP scripts in a “shared-nothing” fork environment, maintaining the strict isolation PHP is known for, so there are no memory leaks or data leaks between requests.

Speaking of that, check out the “full-stack microservice” architecture that allows you to isolate your sensitive credentials / config from the main PHP process, preventing a host of attacks.