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Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

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Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#31
post #28

Why does it matter? Visitors should never hit WP anyway if you are smart. Set up caching.

It makes a big difference if your site isn't just for displaying static HTML content - for example, a WordPress-powered community where users log in to your site.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#32
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I ran a benchmark against CodeIgniter on a test box recently and was suprised that a single query app performance went from around ~20k req/s with raw PHP (no framework) to around ~3k req/s with CI and thought that was bad for a framework. I didn't realize Wordpress performance was so much worse especially given its popularity. Most Wordpress sites use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or Varnish-type setu…

Depends on the WP plugins, I suppose (and Indexes created, and MySQL tuning, etc)

And themes. It's not unusual to see themes that cause 100+ database queries. Per pageview.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#33
> Wordpress 3.6 – 20.0% gain (253 vs 211 req/sec)

How do you generate 211 pages per second on Wordpress to begin with? My server does page generation for my own custom-built blog in ~15ms, but takes a whopping three seconds for a single Wordpress page. I know it's somewhat offtopic and it's about the relative results, but what hardware is this?

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#34
post #8

This sounds like a nice improvement to PHP performance. Are there any parts of the language that will have to change for this enhancement? I expect that that changes will be minimal, if any are needed.

From what I can see there shouldn't be any userland breaks unless it's very obscure.

In the internals all of the zend_hash apis have been updated so it may have an effect on some extensions, though the core extensions can all be updated.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#35
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just try to imagine HHVM in year or two. Zend PHP will be irrelevant by then.

The only way that is going to happen is if HHVM was integrated into PHP core (similar to ZendOpcache).

HHVM is a reimplementation of the PHP language.

http://grokbase.com/t/php/php-internals/12bvegp9cv/hhvm-and-...

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#36
post #7

I love how, through all the hate and bandwagoning, some people don't get discouraged and actually do something to improve the product. We still do new projects in PHP and we couldn't be happier.

> We still do new projects in PHP and we couldn't be happier.

I concur, especially when frameworks like Symfony exist. Reading all this smack talk about PHP on HN is so alien considering how thriving the PHP community actually is.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#37
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it will be 5.7 which is great! Just tested against our codebase, and it builds very quickly (maybe 15-20% increase in speed in unit tests) so very impressed!

Are you using a framework? Like ZF, etc?

Internally built framework. But we use external packages like AWS SDK (and so by extension Guzzle), Elastica, etc.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#38
post #7

I love how, through all the hate and bandwagoning, some people don't get discouraged and actually do something to improve the product. We still do new projects in PHP and we couldn't be happier.

Dmitry is the man who originally wrote eaccelerator, Zend caught wind of him and hired him! Then he worked on opcache and has done some amazing things in getting the Zend Engine and PHP itself flying. He's a very smart cookie.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#39
post #33

> Wordpress 3.6 – 20.0% gain (253 vs 211 req/sec) How do you generate 211 pages per second on Wordpress to begin with? My server does page generation for my own custom-built blog in ~15ms, but takes a whopping three seconds for a single Wordpress page. I know it's somewhat offtopic and it's about the relative results, but what hardware is this?

Are you running an opcache like Zend Opcache, APC, XCache etc? 3 seconds is amazingly slow.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#40
post #21

Refactoring Wordpress will make it even faster. Look at the difference between Drupal and Wordpress. It's amazing Wordpress is still used for big sites while a ton of recourses could be saved. But great work on the PHP engine!

I don't think it's fair to say that Drupal is faster than Wordpress by just looking at the req/sec.

According to https://wiki.php.net/phpng, they benchmarked against Wordpress 3.6 (the current version is 3.9). I couldn't find anything about the Drupal benchmark, but it could be a simple "Hello world" for all we know.

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