3 ms·

I have a bone to pick with your last contention. At what load does the PHP runtime begin to become the performance bottleneck, particularly with APC enabled? As

I have a bone to pick with your last contention. At what load does the PHP runtime begin to become the performance bottleneck, particularly with APC enabled? As far as I know, Facebook is about the only application with enough load to test the limits of the PHP interpreter itself. I was under the impression that PHP itself is actually quite performant...

pjmlp 13y ago
Facebook runs compiled/JITted PHP code.
- swalkergibson 13y ago
  Right, but they are only doing that because they serve so much traffic. The original post suggested performance "falls to shit pretty immediately at load." I cannot imagine they meant that you need to do some serious gymnastics to get around performance bottlenecks when you get to Facebook's scale. My supposition is that most web scripting languages would need tuning at that level.
AdrianRossouw 13y ago
see: drupal. having to execute the whole application from the entry point on every page hit is just awful. APC will only save you the loading from the disk and compiling part, not the whole execution chain. with node and others the application is just sitting there, listening to a port, and fires the right callbacks when a request comes in. the application startup cost is paid once. not on every request. there are people who have tried to reproduce it in php by having php running and serving multiple requests in a similar manner. This is really treacherous since php didn't even pretend to free memory under any circumstances ever, until about php 5.3. since moving over to writing servers, i just feel that the php model of executing the script when a url is hit is just fundamentally wrong.
- swalkergibson 13y ago
  Drupal lives in its own separate category somewhere near Mars. Just because Drupal is slow does not mean that PHP itself is the reason why. > APC will only save you the loading from the disk and compiling part Is that not the slowest part? According to the benchmarks here, http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7&test=json http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7..., PHP is only really slower than Node in serving up a plaintext response and a json serialization (although, it is only about a 5% difference in responses/sec between the two).

pjmlp 13y ago

Facebook runs compiled/JITted PHP code.

swalkergibson 13y ago
Right, but they are only doing that because they serve so much traffic. The original post suggested performance "falls to shit pretty immediately at load." I cannot imagine they meant that you need to do some serious gymnastics to get around performance bottlenecks when you get to Facebook's scale. My supposition is that most web scripting languages would need tuning at that level.

AdrianRossouw 13y ago

see: drupal. having to execute the whole application from the entry point on every page hit is just awful. APC will only save you the loading from the disk and compiling part, not the whole execution chain. with node and others the application is just sitting there, listening to a port, and fires the right callbacks when a request comes in. the application startup cost is paid once. not on every request. there are people who have tried to reproduce it in php by having php running and serving multiple requests in a similar manner. This is really treacherous since php didn't even pretend to free memory under any circumstances ever, until about php 5.3. since moving over to writing servers, i just feel that the php model of executing the script when a url is hit is just fundamentally wrong.

swalkergibson 13y ago
Drupal lives in its own separate category somewhere near Mars. Just because Drupal is slow does not mean that PHP itself is the reason why. > APC will only save you the loading from the disk and compiling part Is that not the slowest part? According to the benchmarks here, http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7&test=json http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7..., PHP is only really slower than Node in serving up a plaintext response and a json serialization (although, it is only about a 5% difference in responses/sec between the two).