Sure. I guess I'm wondering how it compares to running plain old Apache/PHP in a production environment. Or, is it more like a Django/Rails stack? Does it use the same memory footprint as PHP, etc?

Facebook hasn't used plain old Apache/PHP in production for several years (HipHop for PHP was announced in Feb 2010), so it is hard to compare.

HHVM is its own web server (although it supports FastCGI for easier use with existing infrastructure like nginx), and that's how we use it in production. It's hard to compare memory usage, except at scale, where it benefits from not having a whole bunch of interpreters (in different processes) running at the same time and some other benefits by using more appropriate types to store values through type inference.

On the scale of a single request (doing stuff from the command line), most benchmarks I've seen are about half the memory footprint. Obviously that's going to vary program to program ($data = file_get_contents("some2gbfile.txt"); is going to take 2GB, regardless), but for "normal usage" 1/2 looks fairly common.

On a webserver, that goes further since HHVM is single-process/multi-thread, whereas PHP (in its typical setup) is multi-process/single-thread. This cuts HHVM's memory overhead much further.

Yes, PHP can run multi-threaded, but it still has a number of instability issues in that mode.