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Blog Post
Jeremy Andrews - November 4, 2026
From Malloc to Match (Part 2): The Evolution of PHP Through the Lens of a Systems Programmer
Jeremy Andrews, Tag1's Founding Partner and CEO, follows PHP and Drupal from the Symfony-driven rebuild of Drupal 8, through PHP 7's engine rewrite that shrank a typical value from about 48 bytes to 16, to Drupal 11.4, which needs just over a third of the database and cache lookups of Drupal 11.0 on a cold cache. He also shows how fixes from a Tag1 audit of London.gov.uk cut its slowest requests from about 75,000 database queries to 10,000.
Tags: Architecture, Drupal 7 Extended Support (D7ES), Drupal, Gander for Drupal Performance Testing, Goose for Load Testing, Open Source CMS, Performance, Scalability
