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Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:17:38 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Which OSs and SAPI should PHP 5.6 support?
From: ellison.terry@gmail.com (Terry Ellison)

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On 20/08/13 16:50, Johannes Schlüter wrote:
> <snip> Terry Ellison wrote:
>> PHP (unlike some language alternatives) seems to be doing little to
>> improve general performance, and the discussions related to
>> performance on this DL are almost non-existent.
> Looking at any benchmark from 5.2 to 5.3 to 5.4 and 5.5 shows notable
> improvements (5.4 to 5.5 maybe not as much as the others) saying we do
> little is a bit misleading.
>
> But well, it is simpler to do these syntax sugar things we're
> bikeshedding about than doing actual core improvements. We have just
> very few people fully understanding the engine and being able to improve
> it. So such discussions gain no traction.
I apologise if this sounded as unreasonably critical, as this wasn't my 
intent.  As it happens, my particular interest is in PHP performance and 
I've got a good understanding of the Zend Engine and opcache, but trying 
to work out how I can contribute effectively to this is difficult for me 
given this lack of traction.

I also know that Dmitry and you guys made some fundamental improvements 
to the 5.4 engine that significantly dropped the op_array sizing and 
lead to perhaps an overall 5-15% performance improvement.  I discussed 
this in some depth on my OPcache documentation on this page:

https://github.com/TerryE/opcache/wiki/The-Zend-Engine-and-opcode-caching#wiki-Comments_on_Zend_engine_performance

However, I don't think that this is appreciated in the wider PHP 
community (for example I can't recall it ever being discussed or 
emphasised on StackOverflow).  I feel that it got lost in the reaction 
to APC not working reliably with the early 5.4 dot releases.

Regards Terry

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