Uncached server side rendered response times in double digit milliseconds.
Thirst thought, that sounds slow. But for the use case of delivering html over the Internet it is fast enough.
For a bit of templating? Yes! What drives response times up is typically the database or some RPC, both of which are out of control of PHP, so I assume these were not factored in (because PHP can’t win anything there in a comparison).
If it’s stateless and nothing is kept in memory, can you have a connection pool?
Anything under like 100ms load is instant to the user, especially a page load. It’s a balancing act of developer experience vs performance. To split hairs over milliseconds seems inconsequential to me. I mean, PHP requires $ before variables! That’s the real controversy :p