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Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

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Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#61

Post by kolev »

kolev wrote: post #15
trebor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it a year or two. Seriously! 5.5 was just released a little while ago and 5.6 is just in beta now.

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

I'm not sure why you guys ganged up to downvote on something obvious - PHP is loosing grounds to HHVM already. I'm considering it for all my PHP projects already - it's easy to install and most PHP frameworks are well-supported already (http://hhvm.com/frameworks/). I can imagine HHVM having integration within Nginx a la HttpLuaModule, which uses LuaJIT and would eliminate going the FastCGI route.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#63

Post by adamors »

Kiro wrote: post #51
adamors wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's so good about Symfony compared to other PHP frameworks?

It's a mature, well designed and cleanly written piece of software that is very modular. It also has a great documentation and knowledgeable community around it.

Other PHP frameworks lack some or most of these features: some are either very opinionated and rigid (Yii, Cake) huge and sparsely documented (Zend 2) or just old and approaching abandonment (Codeigniter, Kohana).

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#64

Post by devNoise »

rossriley wrote: post #34
devNoise wrote: 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.

I think you're right. The line that made me think that something might change is:

"we changed the basement trying to keep most of the building unchanged."

The "most" part made me wonder what obscure part of userland it would be.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#65

Post by Freaky »

muppetman wrote: post #45
lucb1e wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant raw page generation times. With caching it was much quicker of course. I assume the PHP benchmarks are also non-cached, else you're just benchmarking the caching method.

Yea, opcache "caches" the compiled PHP code. So the first "page generation" might take ages, because PHP has to load all the .php files and compile them. But an opcache will _keep_ the compiled versions around, so the next time you need to execute the .php files, it can skip the (very expensive) step of compiling them again. This makes PHP much, much faster. The only time the files are recompiled are if you restart y…

Is an opcache still not included in stock PHP? That was on the cards years ago, as I recall.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#66

Post by coldtea »

newaccountfool wrote: post #56
awestroke wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody mentions how much or little the PHP community thrives. People point out how bad PHP compares against other languages. The fact that you enjoy using PHP and that you can create great products with it does not imply that it has no flaws. Many have been where you are now, and then moved on to other languages to never ever look back. From what I've seen, the reverse is much less common.

If you enjoy programming in it, and you can create great code then what's the problem?

That you are too pragmatic for the fashion victims of programming.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#67

Post by coldtea »

lucb1e wrote: post #54
pjbrunet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could just be your hosting. For example, with Media Temple (years ago) I found it often took 7+ seconds just to redirect www to non-www, up to 12 seconds. Pingdom is a good tool to see where you're getting stuck http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ Another common problem, your MySQL database could be overloaded (especially with shared hosting) and more caching won't necessarily solve the problem.

If it's my hosting (which was an eee pc btw) then why does my self-written blog load in 15ms? But yeah on shared hosting with more cpu power, wordpress performed much better.

>If it's my hosting (which was an eee pc btw) then why does my self-written blog load in 15ms?

Because it hit some sweet spot that WP blew over for your host specs? Either memory, number of queries, etc?

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#68

Post by lmz »

Freaky wrote: post #65
muppetman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, opcache "caches" the compiled PHP code. So the first "page generation" might take ages, because PHP has to load all the .php files and compile them. But an opcache will _keep_ the compiled versions around, so the next time you need to execute the .php files, it can skip the (very expensive) step of compiling them again. This makes PHP much, much faster. The only time the files are recompiled are if you restart y…

Is an opcache still not included in stock PHP? That was on the cards years ago, as I recall.

It is if you're using version 5.5: http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.opcache.php

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#69

Post by coldtea »

kolev wrote: post #58
trebor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevant how? I doubt BlueHost, HostGator, Dreamhost, etc, and on and on will have implemented HHVM as their core PHP offering by then. Most web hosts still have PHP 5.3 installed, and even the PHP 5.4 I've used on Media Temple's servers is out of date. But at the rate PHP's release cycle has accelerated (remember that 5.3 dates from 2009...) it's entirely likely that the trend will continue. And more hosts are off…

In 2 years, HHVM will perform so much faster than PHP 6 and Hack will offer so many added benefits that even the shared hosting guys will switch to it as it will make them serve more sites with the same hardware plus developers will push to have Hack in place anyway.

That's not how it normally works with those kinds of re-implementations.

Heck, Python 3 hasn't even replaced Python 2 -- and people will dump PHP for Hack? A language which doesn't even have a community at the moment, it's 99% Facebook people.

Re: Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

#70

Post by whatts »

beaumartinez wrote: post #27
nodesocket wrote: post #17

Love the work, but honestly by the time PHP 5.7 is ready for mainstream (with extension support mysqli, memcache, mongo), Facebook HHVM will be the defacto standard. FB has a huge head start and can throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem. Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong.

It's Facebook, not FaceBook. Spelling it like that makes reading it jarring.

90% of people write DropBox, as well ;)
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