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Analysis of 1,240 production PHP projects reveals that PHP itself accounts for an average of 40.3% of total request time, directly challenging the common claim that 'PHP is rarely the bottleneck; I/O is.' For 34% of projects, PHP consumes more than 50% of request time. E-commerce and CMS platforms like Magento 2, Shopware 6, and WordPress average close to 50% PHP time, while framework-based apps like Symfony and Laravel sit around 35%. The higher PHP overhead in plugin-based systems is attributed to generic abstractions and hook-heavy architectures. The data comes from projects filtered for production environments, 10k+ daily requests over 30 days, and properly configured OPcache.

Mythbusting “PHP is rarely the bottleneck,” data shows 40% of time spent in PHP

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~35–40% is not a huge number. Yes, in theory Node.js will be faster, but not by much. Also, there is a possibility to run PHP in memory, like with FrankenPHP in worker mode, which will probably beat Node.js here. However, modern reactive web apps have a bottleneck on the frontend not backend. So this article only shows us one thing: do not use WordPress and other old CMSs.

I wonder if their customer base is mostly PHP 5

I mean 40% is not a dismissable number, but saying that it mythbusted it might a bit too much.
If this is the data, then the botterneck IS the IO, its basic math 60% &gt; 40%. PHP could be more efficient yes, but the major part of the time is still allocated for IO.

I come from WordPress world where code is Wild West, including the WP core. I’ve seen many sites with 0.05-0.1s DB query and 2-3s of PHP. Is it’s PHP’s fault? NO!
We need to accept that very permissive programming language and open-source projects will not be well optimized for performance. So if you allow noob coder create a plugin and for adding it into WP repo is required just some check of security, you can’t expect great performance. And my impression is that PHP community is kind of distancing from WP as if it was doing bad PR to the language, and they have a point.
Another thing is education. I’m yet to see ONE, I repeat ONE course of PHP where performance is mentioned. Just mentioned, forget explained and driven all effort into great performance code.
A PHP project, unless have a lead developer that watch out for practices leading to slow code and junior-mid devs willing to learn and follow, nothing will happened.