I'm a professional PHP, Python and Javascript developer from the UK. I've worked with Django, Laravel, and React, among others. I also maintain a legacy Zend 1 application.
It's been my experience that when an application is slow, the bottleneck is nearly always one of the following:
Excessive numbers of database queries (often caused at least in part by the N+1 problem)
Slow/inefficient queries
Slow or excessive requests to third party API's
These are all issues that can be resolved by refactoring queries, using eager loading, and caching responses where appropriate. A compiled version of PHP wouldn't help with these.
In addition, if you have the opcode cache enabled (which you should in production), your PHP code gets compiled into bytecode anyway, so in a sense it is compiled.
In the extremely unlikely event that you do come across a situation where the language itself is the bottleneck, it is possible to write an extension to do it in a lower-level language. I've tried Zephir before for this as it's easier than writing a PHP extension in C, but to be honest, I found it was very hard to get better performance out of a Zephir class than an equivalent PHP and not worth the effort.
PHP 7 is pretty fast (certainly fast enough for my needs) as long as you don't have other bottlenecks in your code.
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It wouldn't make very much difference at all.
It's been my experience that when an application is slow, the bottleneck is nearly always one of the following:
These are all issues that can be resolved by refactoring queries, using eager loading, and caching responses where appropriate. A compiled version of PHP wouldn't help with these.
In addition, if you have the opcode cache enabled (which you should in production), your PHP code gets compiled into bytecode anyway, so in a sense it is compiled.
In the extremely unlikely event that you do come across a situation where the language itself is the bottleneck, it is possible to write an extension to do it in a lower-level language. I've tried Zephir before for this as it's easier than writing a PHP extension in C, but to be honest, I found it was very hard to get better performance out of a Zephir class than an equivalent PHP and not worth the effort.
PHP 7 is pretty fast (certainly fast enough for my needs) as long as you don't have other bottlenecks in your code.