Some fairly large Internet services are pressing into production Facebook’s open-source PHP runtime engine after being impressed with the performance metrics for the alternative to the ubiquitous open-source PHP package used across the Web.

WordPress hosting site WP Engine has found that the Facebook HipHip Virtual Machine (HHVM) executes PHP commands 5.6 times faster than a standard PHP interpreter.

“PHP, compared to HHVM, is wicked slow,” said Tomas Puig, WP Engine’s director of labs. “So I saw an opportunity for us to use HHVM to drive WordPress.”

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