What is your favourite technology stack for web development?

It's better to take the route of dynamic/scripting languages when building a product at it's initial stages. Since time is the most critical factor, the decision makes sense. Just pick a language you're comfortable with. If you're experimenting, then the tech stack does not really matter. However, if you are infact building a real world product, then I suggest you choose the stack you're most comfortable with, to reduce the time taken to build/test/release new features.

What you are looking for is performance and not new server side programming language. When it comes to web applications then most languages more or less offer approximately same performance. If you have doubt over PHP's performance ability then have a look at Facebook. Facebook with more than a billion users is built using PHP (LAMP) stack. So you have world's biggest POC available with you to verify that PHP application can be real fast. What you really need is an efficient architecture for the application. Follow web application architectural guidelines and you will be saved from lots of hidden performance issues. In general, when you change a programming language, you are actually changing the ecosystem. This new ecosystem will solve tooling problems if you. It will provide you with ready to go frameworks. It may help you solve programming problem with ease that are otherwise not so trivial in other language. Take python and C++ for example. What you do with C++ code can easily be achieved in python in just one line (Take file reading-writing operations). With new language, you might be able to reduce the amount of code you write and so the time-to-market period. But, this new language will come with its own issues of performance. In one word, it really does not makes sense to change the server side language just for the sake of performance. However, if you really think that your current PHP code is not upto mark and there is nothing that can be done, then it is time for you to change your entire approach to development. NodeJS for example is radically different way of doing server side code. Traditional server programming is synchronous i.e. blocking whereas NodeJS is based on async nature i.e. non-blocking server request. I have seen projects making use of NodeJS. But they have not really used the async API provided by Node resulting in applications that function similar to what was there previously. So honestly, it is a programming error and not the problem with NodeJS. And then, I have also seen applications that are truly making use of async nature of Node where the gain were really substantial. The work that was being done by ten server was now done by just six servers. So it is quite an achievement. Further, same can be applied to the database system. However, here you have a clear choice choice to make between SQL databases i.e. RDBMS and NoSQL databases. Each of these databases serve different purposes. Ideally it is better to use SQL databases for structured data where you can apply principles of normalization etc. while NoSQL databases are better suited for unstructured data. Unstructured data tends to have redundancy. Search Google for detailed explanation. Note this that don't use any technology stack just because it is trending or everyone is using it. I personally love PHP language and it is indeed a beatiful language...