Comment Real numbers and graphs (Score 1) 752
We have done the actual benchmarks, and the original post matches our experience.
PHP gives processing times of around 1 second (for a search function) and C++ code via a CGI gaves times of 0.1 sec. A ten times improvement.
Graphs and numbers are here,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html
Further when we switched to FastCGI we saw another 5 fold improvement, after optimising the code for FastCGI.
So I would believe a 50 folder improvement should be possible by going from PHP to FastCGI (and rewriting code to suit a FastCGI)