Facebook makes PHP 9x faster via virtual machine (HHVM?)

[DRE]

I've asked @MattW to put my forum on hhvm since he is very experienced in server stuff and has hooked my site up in the past for a reasonable price and timely manner. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/my-services.61392/

Just waiting for a price quote if he's willing to do it. I've expect some addons to not work anymore.

 

[xfrocks]

In my tests, HHVM is actually slower.

 

[DRE]

 

[Adrian Schneider]

The JIT compilation can be slower for certain tasks, but the idea is that you are doing these tasks over and over and over again. That initial slowdown should be outweighed in a typical application, after which point you start to see the 5-10x performance gains. For a fair comparison, there is a flag to turn it off for small one-off tasks. It tries to optimize common code paths so it runs faster the next time, but obviously this takes time.

I noticed my test suites were running about 2x faster, but if I run them 100 or 1000 times repeatedly, it runs almost 10 times faster.

 

[xfrocks]

Yes, I noticed that. The first few requests are always an order of magnitude slower but then the JIT kicked in and it runs faster than that. However, I used loader.io to stimulate user requests and for every page that I tried, HHVM uses more CPU, more memory but average response time is slower. I picked up a graph from my review (writing )

php5-fpm 3094 requests, 952ms
https://loader.io/reports/b5e5e00b502676f449bc78e937b14551/results/542560ca92e3a52a67bbfc0e613a7850

hhvm 2315 requests, 1267ms
https://loader.io/reports/b5e5e00b502676f449bc78e937b14551/results/fa570787307554a80c60bb31b645fdaa

The tests were run on the same server, put behind nginx, after a reboot. 100 concurrent users in one minute.

 

[MattW]

I've asked @MattW to put my forum on hhvm since he is very experienced in server stuff and has hooked my site up in the past for a reasonable price and timely manner. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/my-services.61392/

Just waiting for a price quote if he's willing to do it. I've expect some addons to not work anymore.

If you want a server building Dre, just go with nginx and PHP-fpm.

 

[Jeremy P]

@xfrocks That's a bit disappointing, but thanks for sharing the results. Was it against PHP 5.5 with opcache enabled?

 

[xfrocks]

@xfrocks That's a bit disappointing, but thanks for sharing the results. Was it against PHP 5.5 with opcache enabled?

Yes.

root@server1:~# php5-fpm -v
PHP 5.5.3-1ubuntu2.2 (fpm-fcgi) (built: Feb 28 2014 20:06:14)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.3-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2013, by Zend Technologies

oot@server1:~# php5-fpm -i | grep opcache
opcache.blacklist_filename => no value => no value
opcache.consistency_checks => 0 => 0
opcache.dups_fix => Off => Off
opcache.enable => On => On
opcache.enable_cli => Off => Off
opcache.enable_file_override => Off => Off
opcache.error_log => no value => no value
opcache.fast_shutdown => 0 => 0
opcache.force_restart_timeout => 180 => 180
opcache.inherited_hack => On => On
opcache.interned_strings_buffer => 4 => 4
opcache.load_comments => 1 => 1
opcache.log_verbosity_level => 1 => 1
opcache.max_accelerated_files => 2000 => 2000
opcache.max_file_size => 0 => 0
opcache.max_wasted_percentage => 5 => 5
opcache.memory_consumption => 64 => 64
opcache.optimization_level => 0xFFFFFFFF => 0xFFFFFFFF
opcache.preferred_memory_model => no value => no value
opcache.protect_memory => 0 => 0
opcache.restrict_api => no value => no value
opcache.revalidate_freq => 2 => 2
opcache.revalidate_path => Off => Off
opcache.save_comments => 1 => 1
opcache.use_cwd => On => On
opcache.validate_timestamps => On => On

 

[xfrocks]

@xfrocks That's a bit disappointing, but thanks for sharing the results. Was it against PHP 5.5 with opcache enabled?

I guess our workload is not optimized yet in HHVM. In XenForo, PHP doesn't do much anyway, we just get data from database, change it a little bit push it out with templates. I think the template part is the bottleneck (using eval by default). I'm doing tests with template as public to see how that works. Should be faster with both hhvm and php5-fpm though.

 

[Jeremy P]

As in, the option to store templates on the file system?

 

[xfrocks]

As in, the option to store templates on the file system?

Yes. Playing with XenForo performance options and hhvm performance hasn't gotten any better, yet

 

[Rob]

Some great work being done here guys. Thanks for all your testing and benchmarking which helps us all.

 

[p4guru]

Yeah with HVM JIT only kicks in after the 12th request by default. First 11 requests are run in interpreter only mode. Unfortunately, not all PHP apps benefit as much as I have come across a few where php-fpm + zend opcache performed better.

Anyone using Centmin Mod stack like @MattW would be happy to know there maybe a HHVM add on in the works https://plus.google.com/104831941868856035845/posts/AVNxYZ958Bc

 

[MattW]

So, having a quick play with a debian install.

Server version: 10.0.10-MariaDB-1~wheezy-log mariadb.org binary distribution

# php -v
HipHop VM 3.0.1 (rel)
Compiler: tags/HHVM-3.0.1-0-g97c0ac06000e060376fdac4a7970e954e77900d6
Repo schema: a1146d49c5ba0d6db903beb3a4ed8a3766fef182

# nginx -v
nginx version: nginx/1.5.12

All up and working with a test install of XF

 

[Jeremy P]

All up and working with a test install of XF

Working, definitely, but has it been beneficial? That's my question.

It's an exciting technology but I have no plans to use it if php-fpm outperforms it when it comes to the type of stuff XenForo does.

 

[MattW]

Working, definitely, but has it been beneficial? That's my question.

It's an exciting technology but I have no plans to use it if php-fpm outperforms it when it comes to the type of stuff XenForo does.

In my case, no. It's on a test VPS, done simply to see if I could get it working. I'd not use it on my live site any time soon, as my current nginx/php-fpm set up works perfectly well.

 

[StormRider]

In my case XF with a ton of addons runs with HHVM much faster than with PHP-FPM (2-3 times faster). These results were taken on hhvm 2.4, currently running 3.1 (nighty). The huge benefit from 3.0.1+ is mysqli support and no crash every half an hour. Can't make new tests as I currently have no php-fpm installed.

 

[DRE]

In my case, no. It's on a test VPS, done simply to see if I could get it working. I'd not use it on my live site any time soon, as my current nginx/php-fpm set up works perfectly well.

Can you experiment on mine?

 

[MattW]

Can you experiment on mine?

If you really want me to. I can get it working, but can't support it, because I don't know enough about it yet.

 

[Wildcat Media]

lol @ them speculating the decline of FB in that article.

One can only hope.