Serious PHP5b4 speed issues

Hello all I have recently installed PHP 5.0 Beta 4 on my development server and am very concerned with performance. I have read everywhere, that PHP5 offers increased performance. However, in my tests, the requests per second have decreased dramatically: PHP5: Requests per second: 4.23 [#/sec] (mean) PHP4: Requests per second: 23.08 [#/sec] (mean) Full test results are below. The environment and the requested page are identical in both tests (using ab). The tests were run on Apache/1.3.28. Has anyone else experienced similar behavior? Or can anyone suggest what is happening... Thank you in advance. Andrew >> Results with PHP5 module loaded << <snip> Concurrency Level: 10 Time taken for tests: 236.372 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 0 Broken pipe errors: 0 Total transferred: 12732000 bytes HTML transferred: 12514000 bytes Requests per second: 4.23 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 2363.72 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 236.37 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 53.86 [Kbytes/sec] received <snip> >> Results with PHP4 module loaded << <snip> Concurrency Level: 10 Time taken for tests: 43.328 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 0 Broken pipe errors: 0 Total transferred: 12728000 bytes HTML transferred: 12514000 bytes Requests per second: 23.08 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 433.28 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 43.33 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 293.76 [Kbytes/sec] received <snip> __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools