Over the past 20 years, PHP has become the de facto server-side programming language of the web.
From leading open-source software like WordPress to some of the Internet’s most heavily-trafficked sites (Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia to name a few), you’ll find it everywhere. But its developer-friendly syntax comes at a cost.
Before any Web Magic™ can happen, the human-readable PHP source code must be run through an interpreter. This process is expensive (particularly in terms of memory usage) and time-consuming. Ultimately, this sets an upper-bound on the number of simultaneous page requests a given server can handle.
As a site nears this ceiling, it becomes necessary to either make the site more efficient, or upgrade the hardware. For some sites, the answer is to sidestep PHP altogether and implement static page caching. But for others, where dynamic processing is unavoidable, the solution might lie in the interpreter itself.
As system administrators know, there is no shortage of PHP interpreters on the market.
Each has its own quirks, configurations, and compatibility issues, so there is no one-size-fits-all solution. But with a little experimentation and a lot of testing, performance gains can be substantial. One of the most promising interpreters available today is the Hip-Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM).
Developed in-house by Facebook, the name of the game for HHVM is speed. For one thing, HHVM meets the machine halfway, converting PHP source code into an intermediate bytecode (this bytecode, then, is what’s left to dynamically interpret at runtime).
This is similar to what PHP extensions like Xcache bring to the table. Another trick up its sleeves: HHVM uses a single multi-threaded process to handle requests (unlike, for example, PHP-FPM, which spawns multiple processes).
This leads to much more stable CPU and memory usage for servers operating under heavy loads. A couple months ago, one of the more resource-heavy sites managed by Bright Bright Great was suffering from a substantial increase in traffic. While publicity is one of the better problems to have, it did pose difficulties for the server, which simply wasn’t configured for that level of interest.
After some (reading: lots of) compatibility testing, we successfully transitioned from PHP-FPM to HHVM. The results were astounding.The average DOM-Ready time dropped by 46%. Simultaneous page serves increased by 112%. And CPU usage under load, once maxed out, remained stable at a healthy 55%.
In fact, the PHP gains were so successful the bottleneck was shifted to MySQL. After some code rewrites to help the site take advantage of object caching (via HHVM’s implementation of APC), the simultaneous page serving capacity was nearly doubled again.
But wait, there’s more! As part of HHVM’s regular development cycle, its engineers are locked in a room with a surfeit of junk food and coffee (I imagine) and tasked to further optimize the code already in place. By focusing on improvements that directly benefit widely-used software, the real-world impact of any gains made is maximized.
With the recent release of version 3.8, HHVM was able to serve 9.7% more pages per second for WordPress, 4.8% for MediaWiki, and 13.9% for Drupal8 (uncached). We ran quick before and after tests ourselves (against the site previously mentioned) using the command line program siege. Sure enough, the upgrade was able to serve 4.3% more pages per second. HHVM is indeed the gift that keeps on giving!
Tiffany Stoik, Front-End Developer
