This page gives short information about development state of a new PHP branch based on refactored Zend Engine.

The phpng branch has been merged into master and has been used as the base for PHP 7.0

Some technical implementation details are available at phpng-int. Information for extension maintainers at phpng-upgrading.

Slides from a talk at ZendCon-2014 phpng-php7.pdf

Note: For anonymous checkout, use https://git.php.net/repository/php-src.git instead of git@git.php.net:php-src.git

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
git clone git@git.php.net:php-src.git
cd php-src
./buildconf
./configure     --prefix=$HOME/tmp/usr     --with-config-file-path=$HOME/tmp/usr/etc     --enable-mbstring     --enable-zip     --enable-bcmath     --enable-pcntl     --enable-ftp     --enable-exif     --enable-calendar     --enable-sysvmsg     --enable-sysvsem     --enable-sysvshm     --enable-wddx     --with-curl     --with-mcrypt     --with-iconv     --with-gmp     --with-pspell     --with-gd     --with-jpeg-dir=/usr     --with-png-dir=/usr     --with-zlib-dir=/usr     --with-xpm-dir=/usr     --with-freetype-dir=/usr     --with-t1lib=/usr     --enable-gd-native-ttf     --enable-gd-jis-conv     --with-openssl     --with-mysql=/usr     --with-pdo-mysql=/usr     --with-gettext=/usr     --with-zlib=/usr     --with-bz2=/usr     --with-recode=/usr     --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config
make
make install
mkdir $HOME/tmp/usr/etc
vi $HOME/tmp/usr/etc/php.ini

max_execution_time=600
memory_limit=128M
error_reporting=0
display_errors=0
log_errors=0
user_ini.filename=
realpath_cache_size=2M
cgi.check_shebang_line=0

zend_extension=opcache.so
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.save_comments=0
opcache.fast_shutdown=1
opcache.validate_timestamps=1
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.use_cwd=1
opcache.max_accelerated_files=100000
opcache.max_wasted_percentage=5
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.consistency_checks=0

Now PHP must be installed and configured. The final check.

$ sapi/cli/php -v
PHP 7.0.0-dev (cli) (built: Apr 28 2014 11:13:04) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.7.0-dev, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.4-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2014, by Zend Technologies

You may run synthetic benchmarks

$ sapi/cli/php Zend/bench.php
$ sapi/cli/php Zend/micro_bench.php

You may measure the performance of some web applications

$ sapi/cgi/php-cgi -T 1000 /var/www/html/wordpress/index.php > /dev/null‘‘

You may do the same with callgrind profiler

$ valgrind --tool=callgrind --dump-instr=yes --separate-recs=1 sapi/cgi/php-cgi -T 100 /var/www/html/wordpress/index.php > /dev/null

Finally, you may run PHP as FastCGI server using CGI SAPI or FPM (it requires additional configuration)

$ PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=4 PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=0 sapi/cgi/php-cgi -b /tmp/fcgi-php

I would recommend build PHP from master and phpng branches and compare their performance