HHVM/PHP is a beast compared to php 5.5 and shows competing performance over Node

May be this is because of a combination of reasons that PHP has been optimized to compete with itself and other trending languages: they include : * HHVM-PHP is compiled & may or may not be statically typed * It uses multiple threads to handle and process n no. of requests concurrently * PHP source into bytecode & JIT support * Fewer CPU and RAM usage and therefore less resource consumption. So, the ability to use it as procedural, object-oriented or scripting language for web makes it an ideal competitor for coldfusion, ruby or Java apps written for web applications.