Hi, my name is Julius and I performed the said benchmark while being an intern at FB.

Yes, we used opcode cache in PHP. I definitely don't consider myself to be an expert on PHP configuration. I used the default settings. I was obviously also very suspicious of the results that we got. To the extent, that I consulted a few people about what could be improved about the PHP setup. I remember opcode cache was the first thing I checked, since it's something everyone knows and talks about. It was turned on.

I will update the blog post first thing tomorrow (sorry guys, it's the middle of a night here in Poland, so don't feel like doing it right now).

Cheers.