They note that 5.6 has some substantial performance improvements over 5.3. I'd point out that PHP 7, coming out later this year, will be even faster (perhaps as much as 2x 5.6), since some very smart people have done some big internal refactoring in the Zend engine, largely to reduce allocations, pointer indirection, and memory usage. These efforts combined have resulted in pretty big performance gains, making PHP 7 more competitive with HHVM performance-wise. In addition, writing PHP extensions is somewhat nicer now.<p>Zeev Suraski (one of the original two Zend Engine authors along with Andi Gutmans, also co-founder of Zend, Inc.) did some benchmarks:<p><a href="http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng.html" rel="nofollow">http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng.ht...</a><p><a href="http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng-magento.html" rel="nofollow">http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng-ma...</a><p>However, bear in mind that those benchmarks were faked* by Zeev, a Zend Engine proponent. Benchmarks faked* by HHVM engineers might show a larger gap. ;)<p>* I'm not using "faked" in its normal sense. They probably weren't fraudulent, but I am a believer that we should say "fake a benchmark" and not "make a benchmark" given that they can be so circumstantial and misleading: <a href="http://blog.ajf.me/2014-10-23-on-benchmarks" rel="nofollow">http://blog.ajf.me/2014-10-23-on-benchmarks</a><p>Disclaimer: I am, myself, biased towards the Zend Engine, I'm a php-src committer.
Hooray! I'm a massive fan of HHVM, though not just because it's so fast: Hack is something I'm really interested in. The collections libraries in the stdlib are brilliant to use, and the static typing makes writing some types of code easier and keeps some bugs out of my codebase. The only thing I wish to see is more editor/IDE support for it, so I helped contribute to hack-sublime and have been writing my own plugin for Komodo Edit/IDE.<p>HHVM and Hack were the impetus for me to learn OCaml, which is a lovely language. It's good to see more and more places picking up HHVM, and it's also great to see PHP5.6 and 7 increasing performance drastically, too!
Congrats to FB for donating their engineering resources to helping Wikipedia. How do we make this more the norm for large corporations with talent? Something akin to Google's 10% time but with a social-good focus? It might help silicon valley's reputation in a larger sense.
This is great news to see. I have tested HHVM with our particular application load and I found it to be a bit tricky to tune just right. However PHP 5.6 has been solid in production for us handling 5 billion requests daily.
The y-axis of the first graph should start at 0. Being more than twice as fast is quite a lot. There is no need for cheap tricks.<p>If you aren't visualizing tiny deltas, don't truncate the y-axis. It's misleading.
The results would have been very interesting if they switched from PHP 5.6, but switching from 5.3 to HHVM is impossible to know how much of the improvements are due to the newer PHP and how much to HHVM. Nevertheless, Wikimedia must be really satisfied.
how does HHVM compare to PHP 7 in terms of speed savings? PHP 7 is supposed to be pretty damn fast from what I have seen. I guess benchmarks are hard to read because they're dependent upon a lot of factors. It would be interesting to see two sites at similar scales running competing engines for PHP (hhvm vs. PHP 7).
Thank you to both Wikipedia and Facebook for being transparent and sharing this back to the open source community. It's these type of joint efforts that really move the web forward. Hats off.
Intersting, I didn't realize PCRE now has JIT support. <a href="http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html" rel="nofollow">http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html</a><p>Also, that page points to Apple's YARR, which I didn't know about either (and Chrome's irregexp, which I did).
I would love to use hhvm,
unfortunately my IDE of choice PHPStorm doesn't support it yet :(
despite a big long list of customers requesting it.
<a href="https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-21737" rel="nofollow">https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-21737</a><p>What editor do Facebook and Wikipedia use for their HHVM/PHP development out of interest?<p>edit: downvoted? really? for what?
"Peak CPU utilization dropped from about 70% to 12%, almost a 6x improvement."<p>That is substantial, and HHVM should bear to rest some of the claims (trolls) that PHP is not performant.