PHP4 vs PHP5 Performance?

Recently, I've been doing a lot of benchmarking with Apache to compare
different OSes and platforms. I did a stock install of Ubuntu 7.04
Server w/ Apache2 and PHP5. To do the test, I used ab to fetch the
following document:

<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Web Server Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
</body>
</html>

I ran ab in a loop 12 times with 10,000 connections and a concurrency
of 10. Then I threw out the highest result and the lowest result and
averaged the remaining values. Both PHP4 (v 4.4.7) and PHP5 (v
5.2.3) were built as Apache modules, and I simply changed Apache's
config file to swap modules.

The results were somewhat surprising to me: on average, PHP4
significantly outperformed PHP5. Over our LAN PHP5 handled roughly
1,200 requests / sec while PHP4 handled over 1,800 requests / sec.
Since everything I have heard/read is that PHP5 is much faster than
PHP4, I expected the opposite to be true, but the numbers are what
they are. Also PHP on Apache1 was much faster than on Apache2.

The only difference I can figure is that PHP5 was the packaged version
that comes with Ubuntu and I had to compile PHP4 from source since
there is no package for it in Feisty. But I wouldn't expect a 50%
increase as a result of that. Any thoughts on this?
.

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