I just took an old PHP site I used to run (no framework or libraries) and had codex transpile it to rust. Ran it behind identical nginx config, just switching out php-fpm's socket for the rust/tokio one. Rust was way worse, so I let codex time the performance resulting in it opting for micro-caching everything and then we got about comparable rps and latency - but those improvements would all help in PHP as well.