Interesting analogy, performance wise PHP has made impressive progress. On par with node and the JVM. But Java code specifically is just so bloated. And then there is the worker-per-request model in PHP - All resources isolated to a worker and cleanup on exit. This avoids global garbage collection freezes by design. Something you would get otherwise only from Elixir/Erlang natively. Compared to the JVM that allows PHP applications to scale vertically to any amount of RAM/CPU, and horizontally to any amount of machines. If you let me free choices I'll do Elixir all day long. But pressed on Java vs. PHP for a web app it's PHP for sure.