Everybody wants quick applications. A lot of that speed can be gained by the way you write your software, but a big chunk has to do with the way PHP is configured. As PHP matured, it got quicker, it used less memory and it accumulated a lot of settings which can be tuned for performance.
The biggest, and often most misunderstood, features for performance are OPCache (introduced in 5.5) and preloading (introduced in 7.4). This talk covers how both features work, how you can take advantage of them on your servers and during deployments, and tries to show all the ini settings relevant for performance.