Running a C program instead of PHP?

[MrBarby]

Hi,

I'm developing a project that requires a lot of encryption in PHP. Beyond optimizing the encryption routines, I was wondering what else I could do to improve speeds.

I was thinking I could write a C app to do the encryption and call it from PHP... would this result in a noticible speed increase? How efficient is PHP at running long encryption loops compared to compiled programs?

Cheers,

Jack