Another piece to this (for those using MySQL as their backend) is that updates to MySQL can improve things quite significantly as well.<p>In my work environment I"m the main MySQL user so I had setup a dedicated MySQL 5.5 server a few years ago that I hadn't upgraded to any newer versions since then (hey it wasn't broke right?). But recently I had been looking into upgrading just because it felt like it was time, but earlier this week I was checking out some performance degradation on one of our sites and noticed in my local copy it was actually running quite a bit faster.<p>Investigating further, it seems that in the newer versions of MySQL (in my case, my local XAMPP was running MariaDB 10.1.x) the performance has improved quite a bit, particularly for the types of queries I was running on this site (which used a number of subqueries and GROUP BY clauses).<p>Without any sort of application level caching making this single switch from MySQL 5.5 to MariaDB 10.1.19 improved load times from about 3.0 seconds to 1.0 seconds and I'm going to add some application level caching as well to improve things further.<p>This was all without switching PHP versions on this particular site (which is still using PHP 5.4.45)...just thought I'd share since sometimes the slowness isn't always improved as much just by upgrading PHP (which is something I'd like to do too for this site, but at the moment the framework I'm using on the site isn't ready for PHP 7 so it'd be quite a bit of work to switch it out).
Despite all the negativity about PHP, I sincerely thank all the team behind it. Thanks to PHP and its easy way of start building stuff, I started learning programming.<p>While I have moved on, not because it's hip to do so, I hope the community keeps rocking. Thank you again and congratulations.
Is there anymore major performance improvements left to make to PHP or is everything else just dimishing returns?<p>No disrespect to the huge amount of work the PHP team has already completed, they should be praised.<p>Just curious to know if we can expect anymore major performance improvements like we saw from v5 to v7.<p>EDIT: After further searching, appears PHP 8 will have some sort of JIT (with the hope that it'll continue to bring significant perf improvements. More info at <a href="http://news.php.net/php.internals/95531" rel="nofollow">http://news.php.net/php.internals/95531</a>
That's quite a performance improvement. I'm curious if this was directly related to just switching to PHP7, or something under the Tumblr hood, that they improved upon as well. While reviewing their own code.
We use the Rackspace Cloud Sites PAAS. They recently released a PHP 7 beta.<p>For our sites running Bolt - a PHP CMS which makes heavy use of autoloaded classes - we saw a performance improvement between 45 and 55 percent. For Wordpress, it was around 30-40%.
In addition to latency and cpu usage improvements, we also saw a substantial drop in memory usage for code that allocated a large number of objects. After the initial migration, PHP7 has been very solid in production.
I like the performance of php 7 very much. It has/will have an impact on global warming.<p>The only frustrating thing about it is, that there was so much potential unused for so long. Manh k/mwatts of power for nothing.
I wonder if Wikipedia regrets its switch to HHVM, having in mind that PHP7 is quite the same fast as HHVM is real apps and switching to it would require much less work than to HHVM.
> As you can see, the latency dropped to less than half, and the load average at peak is now lower than it’s previous lowest point!<p>the graph they're referencing shows the peak at higher than the previously lowest load. i guess "peak average" is the key to this.
We at www.pricecheck.co.za switched early this year. We were supersized how easy the transition was. We definitely saw a decrease in cpu usage about 20%. Also most of our php-extension(nothing exotic) was also supported already...
Unrelated question: I couldn't find any HN discussions on, what's Tumblr's future since the Verizon purchase? Yahoo let it be, it seems, has Verizon mentioned it?