Facebook dumped a ton of effort into making PHP fast over the last couple of decades. No one has been able to make Python especially fast without breaking compatibility with important libraries (Python exposed virtually the entire interpreter as its extension surface, and since Python is so slow, extensions are a major part of the ecosystem as they're the main way to recoup performance, which in turn means that changing the extension interface to make things faster would break a bunch of the ecosystem, and the Python maintainers are pretty scarred after the 2->3 breaking changes). Pypy comes close, and it has been grinding away to get compatibility, but last I checked you still couldn't so much as talk to a Postgres database through a reputable package.