PHP's 100-Million-Row Challenge Gives Devs 2 Weeks to Prove the Language Isn't Slow

Sarah
Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:58:51 +0000

PHP’s 100-Million-Row Challenge Gives Devs 2 Weeks to Prove the Language Isn’t Slow

Honestly, someone said “PHP is fast now” and a man woke up and chose violence — a 7GB CSV, a $6 server, and two weeks to parse it all.

100,000,000 rows. 2 vCPUs. 1.5GB RAM. No JIT. No FFI. Just PHP and spite.
Brent Roose — the guy behind the Tempest PHP framework — just launched a community speed challenge that’s basically “The Fast and the Furious but with associative arrays.” It runs from Feb 24 to March 15, 2026, and it’s already getting pull requests.

🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary (click for more details) 📖 The Backstory: From 5 Days to 30 Seconds (click for more details) ⚙️ The Rules: Deliberately Cruel (click for more details) 🏆 What You Win (Yes, Elephpants) (click for more details) 🗣️ What the HN Crowd Is Saying (click for more details) 📊 The 1BRC Legacy: Why These Challenges Matter (click for more details)

Cool. PHP devs are speed-running CSV parsing. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

💰 1. Enter the Challenge and Get Known (click for more details) 🔧 2. Build a PHP Performance Audit Service (click for more details) 📝 3. Write the 'How I Optimized' Blog Post (click for more details) 💼 4. Create a 'PHP Optimization Patterns' Course (click for more details) 🛠️ Follow-Up Actions (click for more details)

Quick Hits

Want to… | Do this
Enter the challenge | Fork the repo, write your Parser class, submit a PR
Study the OG challenge | Read the 1BRC results for optimization inspiration
Test locally first | Generate a smaller dataset (1M rows), validate output, then scale up
Talk to other entrants | Check the HN thread and repo issues
Learn about Tempest PHP | Visit stitcher.io — Brent’s blog with years of PHP content

Honestly, if PHP can parse 100 million rows on a $6 server before your React app finishes its first hydration pass… maybe we’ve been making fun of the wrong language.

Read full topic