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Date: Mon, 5 May 2014 07:24:53 -0700
Cc: Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>,
 PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Message-ID: <828B5A86-5E7B-404F-A1F3-BCA2D3B7514F@zend.com>
References: <CA+9eiLtKFMWn7AXyS3_fni1Dyerx3DUW7imZ08P9gLr_FY=TaA@mail.gmail.com> <139CBA89-9FBD-44E9-A4FC-5539F02943BC@googlemail.com>
To: Kevin Ingwersen <ingwie2000@googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] phpng: Refactored PHP Engine with Big Performance Improvement
From: andi@zend.com (Andi Gutmans)

Hi Kevin,

The Zend Engine for many years now has been an integral part of the PHP =
source tree and enjoys contributors from all over the community (not =
just Zend).=20
This refactoring exercise doesn=92t change any of that and as Dmitry =
mentioned, is really a refactoring of the Zend Engine vs. a new thing. =
This started as experimental work and once we figured it was a great, =
viable direction to head in we decided to share it. It does have =
implications for PHP extensions because we made changes to the datatype =
structures, etc. but it=92s been relatively straightforward to update =
the various extensions to conform to the refactored structures.

The benefits do seem to be massive (exceeding our initial expectations). =
Memory usage is *significantly* down, overall performance impact on =
real-world apps is significant and with these changes it=92s opened up a =
lot of additional opportunities for further optimization down the road =
as we are not bottlenecked by our data structures.

Andi

On May 5, 2014, at 7:07 AM, Kevin Ingwersen <ingwie2000@googlemail.com> =
wrote:

> Hey!
>=20
> This sounds like an amazing bit of updatng! :) I am very much looking =
forward to the new release of PHP. But, there is soemthing I do not =
understand.
>=20
> I know that Zend is the current underlying VM, and further, this is =
not actual work by the PHP team=85am I right?
> Further, will phpng replace the vm, or even more parts? Will it still =
need components like TSRM?
>=20
> I am just asking, as I have been working with PHP within embedded =
aplications for a while now (currently working on porting autoconf to =
cDetect). If parts of the  source tree structure changed, I would need =
to refactor the building part as well.
>=20
> Also, I am currently running a rather small but active community. To =
test phpng, I was thinking about silently injecting it thru the cgi =
script, to see how the performance owuld change. Does phpng have any =
effects on currently existing extensions (PDO, memcached)?
>=20
> Kind regards, Ingwie!
> Am 05.05.2014 um 15:07 schrieb Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>:
>=20
>> For people who know me it's not a secret that PHP performance is my =
main
>> responsibility and passion at Zend. Actually, starting from PHP 5.0 =
we
>> already made 6 times speedup on synthetic benchmarks and about 2 =
times
>> speedup on real-life applications. We endlessly made improvements in =
PHP
>> engine and OPCache. However, by PHP 5.5 release we weren=92t be able =
to make
>> any serious progress, and among other things started to experiment =
with
>> memory managers, JIT technologies and other potential ideas.
>>=20
>> I spent a significant amount of time experimenting with JIT, and even
>> created a PoC of transparent LLVM based JIT compiler embedded into =
OPCache.
>> The results on bench.php was just amazing =96 (0.219 seconds against =
2.175 =96 *10
>> times speedup of PHP 5.5*), but on real-life apps we got just few =
percent
>> speedup. This made us look much deeper into some of the runtime
>> characteristics and what was truly the bottleneck to making more
>> substantial progress. It was clear the VM is already highly =
optimized, but
>> works with data structures that require endless memory allocation,
>> deallocation and reference counting. Typical real-life PHP =
application
>> spends about 20% of the CPU time in memory manager, 10% doing hash =
tables
>> operations, 30% in internal functions and only 30% in VM. Of course, =
we
>> tried to JIT only VM code and in most cases it had to perform the =
same
>> memory allocations. So we decided to change focus and work on the big
>> bottlenecks. The idea was to change our data types to minimize heap
>> allocations. This was a very difficult decision because we had to =
start
>> with a huge refactoring, and we had no idea whether it=92s going to =
have any
>> impact or not.
>>=20
>> Now I'm glad to present you a result of our recent four month work. =
It's a
>> refactoring of the PHP engine that significantly improves =
performance,
>> memory usage and builds a foundation for a lot more future =
performance
>> improvements incl. JIT. I'll avoid technical details (more details =
will be
>> published at *http://wiki.php.net/phpng =
<http://wiki.php.net/phpng>*), but
>> in few words - we changed the basement trying to keep most of the =
building
>> unchanged. Right now the new engine already makes *10-30% speedup of
>> php*not only on benchmarks but on real-life applications as well!
>>=20
>> *Some benchmarks we ran so far:*
>>=20
>> Wordpress 3.6 =96 20.0% gain (253 vs 211 req/sec)
>>=20
>> Drupal 6.1 =96 11.7% gain (1770 vs 1585 req/sec
>>=20
>> Qdig =96 15.3% gain (555 vs 482 req/sec)
>>=20
>> ZF test app =96 30.5% gain (217 vs 166 req/sec)
>>=20
>> On some apps we show better results than other PHP implementations. =
It will
>> be great if others here could test this on their apps and compare to =
their
>> existing PHP version to get additional results.
>>=20
>> The re-factoring is not finished yet as the focus was to first test =
whether
>> this effort would deliver results. Not all extensions are supported, =
some
>> tests are failing, and we also have more ideas for additional =
improvement.
>>=20
>> But =04we feel, we=92ve proven enough out to open it up for review, =
feedback
>> and assistance, and wanted to involve the community as soon as we =
managed
>> to get on a promising direction. There=92s more work to do in =
finishing
>> support of all extensions and continue to make some additional engine
>> improvements.
>>=20
>> =05Please try the refactored PHP engine and provide feedback re: =
performance,
>> memory usage and any issues that come up. You may find it in *phpng* =
branch
>> at *php.net <http://php.net>*. Some instructions may be found at
>> *http://wiki.php.net/phpng
>> <http://wiki.php.net/phpng>*. As mentioned, there are some missing
>> extensions so not everything will run.
>>=20
>> I would like to say many thanks to Xinchen and Nikita who made =
significant
>> part of presented work.
>>=20
>> I think that this engine can make the new major version of PHP we=92re
>> talking about a lot more interesting.
>>=20
>> Thanks. Dmitry.
>=20
>=20
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>=20