1) Caching and performance with warm caches is a focus but not the only focus. There are multiple criticals and many non-critical issues to profile scenarios with many fields for example, profiling bootstrap, saving views and so on.
2) Your argument about caching can be turned around. It is very hard to add caching to an application when the architecture doesn't support it. We've been working *very* hard to make the caching as transparent as possible and solving cache invalidation problems.
3) There's no way that you got numbers like that, and differences like that with page caching disabled. My guess would be that your 5.6 run had cold caches or so and you have page caching enabled. Note that this is now a module that you have to disable/enable. Make sure you look at the request time distribution to see if you have some slow requests. For example, when the first request is after enabling a module, then I saw a first slow request at 500ms, and the others at ~50 with page caching disabled.
Here are my numbers with ab -n 1000 (page cache enabled) and -n 200 when it is off:
PHP7, page cache on:
Requests per second: 409.04 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2.445 [ms] (mean)
PHP7, page cache off:
Requests per second: 17.52 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 57.076 [ms] (mean)
PHP 5.6, page cache on:
Requests per second: 280.09 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 3.570 [ms] (mean)
PHP 5.6, page cache off
Requests per second: 13.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 76.264 [ms] (mean)
I khave to respond to this ;)
1) Caching and performance with warm caches is a focus but not the only focus. There are multiple criticals and many non-critical issues to profile scenarios with many fields for example, profiling bootstrap, saving views and so on.
2) Your argument about caching can be turned around. It is very hard to add caching to an application when the architecture doesn't support it. We've been working *very* hard to make the caching as transparent as possible and solving cache invalidation problems.
3) There's no way that you got numbers like that, and differences like that with page caching disabled. My guess would be that your 5.6 run had cold caches or so and you have page caching enabled. Note that this is now a module that you have to disable/enable. Make sure you look at the request time distribution to see if you have some slow requests. For example, when the first request is after enabling a module, then I saw a first slow request at 500ms, and the others at ~50 with page caching disabled.
Here are my numbers with ab -n 1000 (page cache enabled) and -n 200 when it is off:
PHP7, page cache on:
Requests per second: 409.04 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2.445 [ms] (mean)
PHP7, page cache off:
Requests per second: 17.52 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 57.076 [ms] (mean)
PHP 5.6, page cache on:
Requests per second: 280.09 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 3.570 [ms] (mean)
PHP 5.6, page cache off
Requests per second: 13.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 76.264 [ms] (mean)
This is an empty installation with no content.