Why shouldn't that be the case? PHP has been designed from the get go to be super fast and 5.4 introduced a bunch of optimizations that have sped it up even more so. Ruby was designed for programmer happiness, PHP was designed for performance and getting sh*t done.
> PHP has been designed from the get go to be super fast
PHP was never designed to be fast. As far as execution speed goes, PHP will be in the same ballpark as Perl?Python/Ruby. PHP comes up as faster in these tests because of all the extra things the frameworks are doing. See the_mitsuhiko comment above regarding flask for an example.
