Benchmarking NodeJS vs. Async PHP properly

Obligatory link to good, reproducible and widely optimized benchmarks: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...

60% faster doesn't sound to me a large enough difference to select a web stack.

Till date I assumed node was probably ~60 times faster than php, mostly by interpreting results of alioth benchmarks.

Is your only use case to scrape a few pages for 1 user at a time? What if there was 1000 users requesting that scrape concurrently? or 10000?

Benchmarks with N=1 are complete bullshit and you cannot use it at all to reason what will happen with a different N.

Another annoying issue is how code is written. Well optimized code will still perform like shit in interpreters like PHP while typical JS code I see can be improved substantially (10x-100x) by writing code in a way that V8 expects. This speedup potential is usually completely ignored.

This is ReactPHP, not the stock PHP version so the title is a bit misleading and should rather be "Benchmarking Asyncronous PHP (ReactPHP) vs. NodeJS".

ReactPHP is "stock PHP". It just uses PHP differently to how you normally use it on the web (e.g. it provides a webserver etc.)