On the heels of the recent PHP updates to our system – the introduction of PHP sockets and the upgrade to v 5.6.0, we have now activated PHP NG on our servers.

PHP NG was first introduced in May, 2014 as a major effort to refactor the PHP codebase in order to reduce memory consumption and to increase overall performance.

Although still in alpha development, PHP NG is starting to show amazing performance improvements over the current stable PHP version – PHP 5.6, while maintaining 100% compatibility.

The tests of developers have shown that PHP 5.7 NG is performing anywhere between 20% and 110% faster than PHP 5.6 in real-world applications such as WordPress, Drupal or SugarCRM. Memory consumption has been reduced significantly too.

Also, PHP NG’s refactored codebase is an excellent basis for future optimizations, and its performance level keeps improving.

PHP 5.7 NG is used only for development purposes and will most probably not be suitable for production use this year. However, it has all the potential to turn into a phenomenon for servers around the world, with more stable betas and even release candidates expected in early 2015.

You can enable PHP NG from the PHP Configuration section of the Web Hosting Control Panel.