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Not that surprising if you've read the book "The Accidental Billionaires". They specifically mention that there is one person dedicated to writing a PHP compiler and compiling all Facebook PHP.

Also, I don't understand why they don't use one of the currently available PHP compilers, phc or Roadsend. It's possible they started their initiative earlier, but they should have announced it and possibly prevented some duplicate work.

If thats so, then they are reinventing wheel, since there is already PHP compiler available, with is also open source: http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php

High traffic sites are not interpreted on the fly over and over again

Substitute "parsed" for "interpreted" and I agree 100%. There are plenty of high traffic sites that don't JIT every last bit of code, however, and are most definitely interpreted for everything that is not compiled to native code. Sites that use JVMs are typical.

However, I am shocked that special effort is required for PHP to cache intermediate code at all. Certainly mod_perl, mod_python, and the various CFML engines don't require any special effort to cache intermediate code for each page. That is to say nothing of JIT, although there appears to be some progress being made there with regard to PHP.

In reality the real decision is not whether to PHP or C++ but, whether to add a compiler to PHP. The performance of any compiled code is bound to the quality of the compiler and what it can do with the wild interpretive code you feed it.

Examples are of course http://www.phpcompiler.org/ and http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php. So are larger web companies wasting resources and energy simply by failing to pre compile PHP rather than sticking to on the fly compilation.

You mean kind of like Road Send

http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php?pageID=compiler

Clearly you did not read the story submission, or you would have seen this link.

While "the one and true answer" may be seperation of content vs application, that doesn't mean PHP is not a choice as a language. See the Roadsend PHP SiteManager Project (http://www.roadsend.com/siteManager), an Open Source library that allows just this.