As part of my day job we regularly deploy Wordpress sites that efficiently handle hundreds of thousands of page views per day (and yes I realize that's not HUGE but it's not trivial either) and we do it on cheap hardware that would barely run the stock JVM, let alone an actual Java app server.
"High performance" is relative to your costs & needs, and it's all about using the right tool for the job. If you know how to configure and optimize PHP applications properly, you can make them extremely performant.
Either way, it seems you're arbitrarily ignoring whole classes of apps or languages because of some outdated bias (that i bet you just accepted from others and never tested yourself), so you're obviously not interested in an objective discussion.