Re: HipHop for PHP -- WEB400

I agree with that statement to an extent. The reality is that sometimes
performance isn't as big of an issue (i.e. if you have few web site hits)
but sometimes microseconds turn into big issues. The nice thing about
languages like PHP is that they are used by both big and small businesses,
and the big businesses put it through the wringer, and subsequently the
smaller guys get the performance that the bigger guys worked through. If I
had to make a guess I would say that FaceBook couldn't run on the PHP of 6
years ago without having an incredibly huge server farm.

Here's an idea: IBM should work with Facebook to get them running Zend+PHP
on an IBMi and work out a deal where they get similar advertising that Sun
Microsystems got when eBay was running on their infrastructure. Would be
excellent advertising!

Aaron Bartell

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 8:20 AM, <MattLavinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

No major performance issues. If you could publish a list here of common
performance "gotchas" that would be helpful.

Let me clarify my thinking. You will ALWAYS have people that have
convinced themselves that scripting languages are inferior. They count
microseconds and point to time differences that our minds can't even
perceive. Misconceptions and bias are probably two of the toughest thing
to deal with. Anything that makes THAT task easier is good in my book. In
the end, the performance boost HipHop could provide might be secondary to
boost in perception.
.
Matt

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|Re: [WEB400] HipHop for PHP
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Hi Matt,

Yes, Zend is watching :-)

We’re glad to see Facebook publicly acknowledging PHP’s high productivity,
which far surpasses that of Java and .NET. Facebook reports that they now
serve 400 billion(!) PHP-based web pages every month.

We will learn what HipHop concepts apply to the broad PHP community (Not
just IBM i) and what are specific to Facebook. We believe it is important
to continue to fold in new ideas and innovations into the community-based
runtime. We have always adapted to changes within the PHP runtime, whether
these changes were made by us or by the community and will be glad to
continue doing so.

Zend will continue to support PHP and the broad PHP community in multiple
ways including leading the Zend Framework project, contributing to multiple
PHP projects and driving the Eclipse PDT effort.

I would caution anyone from believing this is a magic bullet of any sort.
Please check out what the author of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, had to say about
the subject:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rasmus-lerdorf-php-hiphop-facebook.php

Matt, do you have specific issues about performance using the new Zend
Server beta or are you just generally concerned?

Please share. Hope this helps!

Regards,

Mike

mike.p@xxxxxxxx Cell: (408)679-1011 Office: (815)722-3454

Zend Server for IBM i Beta avilable at
http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/zend-server-5-new-ibmi

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of MattLavinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 1:17 PM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [WEB400] HipHop for PHP

For those who haven't heard, Facebook (believe it or not) announced they
are going to open source a product called HipHip for PHP. Here is part of
the announcement to show why you should care:

<snip>
Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I
have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop
we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty
percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means
less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We
feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as
open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling
large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible
results, it’s certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with
beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source
code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code
into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes
the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some
rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved
performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of
PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take
advantage of these performance optimizations.
</snip>

While reducing number of servers is irrelevant to us IBM i folks, better
performance certainly is not. I get excited at the idea of PHP running at
native speeds. This is an incredibly interesting idea and probably relevant
to every IBM i shop using PHP. I sure hope Zend is paying attention to
this. I'd love to see some real world examples of how much of an impact
this can actually have on performance. If it is as significant the
announcement says, I expect to see HipHop eventually implemented into a
future release of Zend Server. ;)

Matt

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