why I hate php - higher version, worse performance php 5.2.9

a few months ago I wrote about php version 5.2.8 being very low quality. 5.2.9 was out a few days ago and I decided to give it a try hoping all issues are resolved. it looks like it became even worse. after running for 5 minutes relatively OK, although with higher loadaverage, php started performing so badly, that it caused apache to spawn as many children as it was allowed, which resulted in system going 375MB into swap. it sure seems like the higher the version of php gets, the worse it is performing. of course these graphs will give a much better idea:



I let it run for about 20-25 minutes to get good graphs. couldn't let it run any longer because I started getting alerts about abnormal load.

the only difference was the version. php 5.2.9 was compiled exactly the same as the stable 5.2.6. same modules, same hardware, same code to run.

you suck, php. :(