PHP 7.0.0RC5 experimentally available
The PHP developers are about to release a major update to PHP, version 7.0.
The main new feature (as far as most of our customers will be concerned) is vastly improved performance. Our testing shows it can run WordPress sites around twice as quickly, lowering the site’s CPU resource usage significantly. Sites that use it will be able to handle close to twice as many visitors per second.
Although a “stable” version of PHP 7 has not yet officially been released, a “release candidate” preview version is available, and we’ve installed that on our servers for customers who want to test it.
To do so:
- Login to our My Account control panel
- Click PHP Settings
- Choose PHP 7.0 series and click Save Settings.
Keep in mind that this new version of PHP 7 is still experimental and officially unsupported. In addition, it does not yet support the ImageMagick extension (but the more standard GD works fine), nor does it yet support ionCube Loader or Zend Guard Loader.
We’re using it on this blog and haven’t seen any problems, but it almost certainly contains bugs and incompatibilities, some of which could affect your site. That’s why we don’t yet recommend it for most customers. If you have any trouble with it, we’re interested in hearing about that, but you’ll need to switch your site back to a supported version of PHP to fix it.
