PHPEverywhere has a new interesting posting this morning, about an interesting PHP package called Nanoweb, an HTTP server written completely in PHP.

So i benchmarked Nanoweb, a webserver written in PHP, against Apache. Test was repeatedly requesting a 4K HTML file (adodb-session.htm), using M'soft's WAST set at 10 concurrent threads. All software running on a 2.6 Ghz Win XP machine. PHP-CLI 4.3.3 was used to run Nanoweb. [...] Now these figures suggest that a PHP networking app (Nanoweb) running on brand-new 2003 hardware (3 Ghz PC) will be faster than a program written in C (Apache) on good year 2000 hardware (1Ghz PC). I think this sort of performance is pretty good for PHP.

It's a great boost to the community that PHP has come far enough to be able to make these claims. Sure, things like Nanoweb aren't going to replace Apache any time soon, but it's still encouraging. For more discussion on this issue, check out the PHPEverywhere comments.