Facebook Rewrites PHP Runtime For Speed 295
VonGuard writes "Facebook has gotten fed up with the speed of PHP. The company has been working on a skunkworks project to rewrite the PHP runtime, and on Tuesday of this week, they will be announcing the availability of their new PHP runtime as an open source project. The rumor around this began last week when the Facebook team invited some of the core PHP contributors to their campus to discuss some new open source project. I've written up everything I know about this story on the SD Times Blog."
is this being used now? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:is this being used now? (Score:5, Informative)
Try the "Lite" [facebook.com] version. It's much faster, and doesn't have that annoying chat bar.
Nice. (Score:2)
Thanks!
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After using it for a few minutes I got a link to a preference that makes lite the default site. And you have the option to keep a bar on top of the screen that lets you toggle between the two sites.
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:'-(
Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
PHP is for lazy developers. I develop my webapps in C and I even wrote my own httpd to improve performance.
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
JWASM is for lazy developers. I develop my webapps in machine code and I even wrote my own internet to improve performance.
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
Nice try. I rewrote the universe to include php and httpd in the kernel.
Reboot in 3...2...
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Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
Webapps are for lazy developers. I sip my coffee, causing a multiply entangled photon to collapse and resolve the location of countless electrons throughout the universe, spurring various exotic species of butterflies to flap their wings a twitch differently, which in turn subtly alters the flow of the viscid gaseous matter in Earth and various other planets, affecting the touch organs of living matter that can feel moving fluid, which messenger or nervous impulses relay to their minds, creating customer-tailored web content for my clients.
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Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:5, Funny)
I develop my webapps in C and I even wrote my own httpd to improve performance.
C is for lazy coders if you ask me. I hand code and tune assembly language programs on an altair 8800 flipping switches on the front panel. As all real programmers should do.
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know why this has not yet been linked
Just taking a shot in the dark here, but I'll attempt an answer. The reason no one else linked to it is because you're the only one who considers it obligatory. Slashdot regulars will know that this type of thread happens on a near daily basis and with all due respect to xkcd there is simply no need to make another tired attempt at karma whoring.
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PHP is for lazy developers. I develop my webapps in C and I even wrote my own httpd to improve performance.
I've actually done that...a few years ago... With on a chip 1024 byte ram... And I wrote my own fairly hacked tcp/ip stack!!! :) :)
FYI, this was a web 2.0 app, the "index.htm" page included a javascript file from a server on the internet, that using document.write() printed html and included images... Apart from "index.htm" page the chip only served to AJAX requests
High performance in scripting languages? (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point, if you are lucky enough, you will require extremely high performance from your web pages. You start out coding HTML in Notepad and move on to Perl CGI then on to PHP with scripting embedded right in the generated HTML. All the time you gain programming crutches at the expense of processing speed, and for a while this is a great tradeoff.
But one day you start having server hiccups because your scripts can't keep up with your traffic. Sites like Amazon have already run into this and have moved away from scripting languages and back to system languages. Running applications directly on the CPU instead of relying on a runtime to translate (at best) bytecode into machine instructions means maximizing CPU cycles.
So I wonder what longterm benefit there is in improving the language runtime.
Re:High performance in scripting languages? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Static HTML
2. PHP
3. ???
4. Rewrite the PHP runtime
Truth is, that step 3 involves a whole load of steps where 90% of the problem will be database bound. Complied languages are not going to the magic solution in a real world situation.
Re:High performance in scripting languages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly, and it's not like there is so much heavy processing cpu wise. Facebook probably has calculated that they can get enough performance out of recoding the runtime (even 1% is large enough for site as large as facebook). While doing that they also create a faster runtime that everyone can use. Everyone moving to write their sites in C/C++ doesn't make any sense.
Also a lot of the site structure can be cached in memcache or accelerating proxies like squid, so you aren't actually interpreting PHP code lots of the time. Facebook also did a lot of work towards memcache, because they are mostly a DB heavy site, not CPU.
Re:High performance in scripting languages? (Score:4, Insightful)
Complied languages are not going to the magic solution in a real world situation.
whilst that's perfectly true, its only true to a point. Lots of people run eaccelerator or apc on their PHP sites, simply to improve performance. If these pre-compile caches didn't do anything for performance then you'd be totally right, but as they do, you've got to appreciate that replacing the PHP with a compiled language will make a significant difference.
as always, don't guess where performance problems live, measure them. Often you'll be surprised, especially as load increases.
Re:High performance in scripting languages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Check your facts better next time please.
PHP does not have to execute scripts from scratch on every request. APC cache API transparently caches JIT-compiled PHP script intepretations and these are run instead upon request.
Apache does not have to compile regular expression for mapping each URL request, when you specify RewriteRule directives in virtual server or server context it compiles them (or however else it wishes to cache these) on server startup and that is it. During the entire lifetime of the server, the specified rules are no longer interpreted.
Other than that I agree that the current style of server infrastructure we are "enjoying" can be improved at least 100-fold, database access including.
* Truly persistent (across HTTP requests) user memory is a good step in the right way - extend the lifetime of all scripted objects to persist across entire application lifetime (i.e. forever - servers are not supposed to die)
* Many database requests are so primitive that these could bypass TCP socket layer and benefit from extra speed at the cost of no longer being asynchronious. Most PHP developers use blocking database query APIs anyway, even though non-blocking calls are available.
* Compile scripts and run from compiled cache, preferrably as machine code. Think about environment - all those quad-core datacenters wasting cycles, because programmers are supposedly very expensive. Well, they are not that expensive that when a good team get together they cannot re-think this. They can. If nothing, they should worry about the environment too - it is not cheap.
* Offer asynchronious calls where these make sense (i.e. where they can benefit from hardware parallelization). Those devs who know how to make use of them will be happy to do speed up their applications.
In short, cache everything, whenever you can. Memory is cheap. Cache SQL query strings, cache script compilation output, cache, cache, cache.
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You should check your facts first.
I did not say PHP had to PARSE each script per request -- which would happen without an opcode cacher. It has to EXECUTE the script, opcode cached or otherwise, from scratch on each request.
So there is no way for PHP to hold application data in memory between requests, except by using shared memory or a memcache. Other languages like Python, Java, etc... allow you to instantiate your classes and their data upon startup, and then call methods per request, without having to i
Re:High performance in scripting languages? (Score:5, Informative)
At some point they have so much traffic from their webservers to their backendsystems, they saturated their internal network and were dropping UDP.
That's the kind of problems/scale they deal with, I'm surprised PHP wasn't their biggest bottleneck before (they did some work on PHP already, but not something like this).
After all Facebook is the second site after www.google.com-search page (which handles 'just' one task) and Google has pretty much a custom-build platform.
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You are however, dead on on the loading application configuration (including libraries!) once as process local memory, the way "normal" client software functions.
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My understanding is that one of the major problems with PHP for something like facebook - as opposed to a language like Perl or Python - is that unlike other languages, PHP does not manage SQL database session connections. This results in those professional "oops, we fucked up" messages, timeouts, and other fun stuff like that which wouldn't happen (as regularly) if they'd designed things well.
So if they're fixing that in their PHP rewrite, I'd say they're fixing half the problem they've got. The other half
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There's no need to to use a system language for everything. Facebook is probably using PHP on its own and that's just not wise for a site like that.
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What you call a crutch, most developers call an enormous time saver. The web moves so fast that you simply cannot afford to take forever developing it just so that the code executes efficiently. Sure, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby are slower than C or C++. But for at least the last decade, hardware has been cheap enough that it makes a lot more business sense to just throw more servers at the problem than it does to delay your product launch for a year and/or double your programming staff while you make every
Three sources of scripting language inefficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what the fascination is with scripting languages on the Linux platform or with FOSS in general, but it results in slow programs
Speed of development is faster in a scripting language, and in developed countries, below a certain scale, throwing hardware at it is cheaper than throwing programmers at it. The point of the article is that Facebook is above that scale, and programmers to write a new PHP interpreter have become cheaper than adding hardware+power+cooling.
with flaky UIs.
Citation needed. True, the often use a different widget set from the rest of the desktop (e.g. Tk from Tcl and Python and Swing from Java), but the popular widget sets also have scripting language bindings. how can one really tell the difference between a wxWidgets or GTK app written with Python vs. C++?
I like to use refurbished/recycled machines; which means that I'll have an old P4, 512M RAM and a slow bus.
Do these use more electric power than, say, an Acer Aspire Revo? The power consumption of a Pentium 4 and the power to remove the heat it generates can become an issue, especially for a server that's turned on 24/7.
Many times, applications written in a scripting language, whether it be Perl, Python, PHP, or whatever, will hang often and then start working.
There are three causes for this, and you can distinguish them with 'top' or 'Task Manager' or something else that can count CPU time and page file accesses:
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with flaky UIs.
Citation needed.
Run Eclipse.
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JavaScript (Score:4, Insightful)
Flaky UIs - click on a button and nothing happens. Or things not drawing properly.
I've seen buttons do nothing and redraws fail even in compiled programs.
A refurb machine is about a third the cost of a new machine
By "cost", do you include or exclude the cost of power and cooling? And do you include or exclude the cost of replacing failed components? Capacitors die.
scripting languages are not appropriate for large applications with GUIs.
One scripting language has a huge deployment advantage over everything else: ECMAScript. It interacts with Document Object Models exposed by various runtime environments, and it's sandboxed so that users can more or less safely run a program without getting an administrator to install it. You might know it as JavaScript (ECMAScript + HTML DOM) or ActionScript (ECMAScript + SWF DOM). Or would you rather go back to ActiveX, where the web site sends the equivalent of a compiled DLL to each user, which runs with the user's full privileges and doesn't run on anything but a convicted monopolist's operating system?
Re:JavaScript (Score:4, Interesting)
One scripting language has a huge deployment advantage over everything else: ECMAScript.
This is a nice lead-in to my point, though; Facebook is one of those websites that make it look like Firefox is murdering your machine. In reality, it's sites which misuse Javascript. (Sorry, but ECMAScript is just too unwieldy. I wouldn't say it. Too bad, because it desperately needs renaming.) If I leave Slashdot open all night, nothing bad happens. If I leave a long Facebook tab open all night, I have to close it before I can use my browser in the morning, even on my shiny new 4GB RAM system, let alone on my 1GB machines. If they want to improve the user experience, they should try cleaning up their crap Javascript.
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What is worse is some of the flash based games. Cafe World uses about 350mb to 450mb of ram, with Chrome, IE or Firefox. Leave that open and it is leak city. On my new system, it is unplayable using IE (8GB ram, quad processor, q9550, etc.) It seems to me that much of the features and games are just sloppily written, rushed to market, and prone to simply not work at all sometimes. Yes, that is Zynga, not Facebook, but they both suffer from the same problem: everything requires checking in with the serv
Assembler is High Performance (Score:5, Funny)
You want speed use languages that can deliver and don't try to rewrite slow scripting languages to do the job of the trusted old methods, assembler and C.
Re:Assembler is High Performance (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that isn't necessarily true. It might be true in a linear sense, but when it comes to juggling different threads and the like, assembly language as I knew it wasn't all that capable of describing the process all that well. Assembly language is a go-cart with rocket boosters.
I would truly like to see an assembly language revival though. I truly would. It would be a return to sensibilities in programming. It would be a return to being careful with memory usage with improved focus on small efficient programming. It would be a really good thing. I just don't see it happening.
The purpose for these more complex languages is about being able to more symbolically describe the processes to be executed by the machine. Assembly language was some of the worst about that -- if there wasn't a very detailed set of comments for nearly every line of code, it would be nearly impossible to follow in source. These more complex languages will always have their place and purpose. Trying to make them more efficient is a good and useful thing. Now if we were talking about writing the PHP interpreter in assembler, I'd say you had a winner compromise.
Assembly language revival (Score:2)
I would truly like to see an assembly language revival though.
The revival is here. It is called NESdev [nesdev.com]. It's just not for making PC programs because the processes to be executed on a PC tend to be much more complex.
Now if we were talking about writing the PHP interpreter in assembler, I'd say you had a winner compromise.
You'd have to do so over and over for x86, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC, and other architectures on which PHP runs. That's why these interpreters are most often written in C, with occasional reference to the assembly language code that the compiler generates. Really the only time you have to handle assembly in a PC application is when you're implementing a just in
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Really the only time you have to handle assembly in a PC application is when you're implementing a just in time compiler, and it's becoming the fashion to let LLVM do that for you.
That's an interesting combination of overstating and understating the case.
For one thing, your favourite C/C++ compiler likely contains a hand optimized memcpy() routine, down to assembly if it exposes a worthwhile gain, or coded in C with or without intrinsics if it doesn't. Many C/C++ compilers contain hand-optimized floating point routines, even more so in the embedded world. Plus there are many performance libraries out there to handle the heavy lifting in multimedia, mathematics, and encryption, some
Assembler? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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In today's modern processors you wont gain much performance in assembly. A core2duo simply reads the x86 instructions and converts them to risc and much of the optimizations happen at the compiler and during execution on the fly. You can always gain some speed but its nowhere near what it could do just a decade ago.
What also needs to be taken into account is the costs and time to rewrite years of development work from scratch. Sunken costs drive accountants crazy and threaten the job of any IT manager.
Inste
Complexity and cost of embedded approach (Score:4, Interesting)
If your developers are noobs and can't use real languages and there just Object Oriented kids who can't work on memory and need to access everything through abstracted methods, then fire them and get in some embedded developer
Embedded developers tend to 1. work on smaller, more focused systems, and 2. charge more. For one thing, a module inside Facebook deals with data types more complex than those in the firmware of a car engine's microcontroller. And below a certain scale, the money you save by hiring noobs (and taking the tax credit for recent graduates if available) can pay for throwing more hardware at the problem.
Re:Complexity and cost of embedded approach (Score:4, Interesting)
My impression tends to be that the best overall programmers are those with a solid understanding of algorithmics theory, programming language design in general (meaning they have had exposure to all kinds of solutions), and most interestingly, tend to have an understanding of functional programming. The true programmer gods I have come across have always been Lispers, almost without exception.
On the other hand, I never understood what is supposedly so educational and intellectually important in things like assembly. If one only learned that, it wouldn't still mean that one could actually use it for anything... it's just "manipulate state in registers and RAM by making use of extremely rudimentary basic operations". The transformations into machine code from higher-level program solution descriptions are much more consistently handled by a compiler than a human, and as that is manual, automatable work, it may be more important to study compiler construction... (which Lisp is pretty good for)
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You are kind of person I would never hire. Period.
Assembly doesn't mean speed. there is only potential not more. It has become increasingly difficult to develop in assembly as the architecture and complexities involved (drivers, APIs, hardware, devices, underlying os, etc.) has evolved so much. Decent optimizing compilers nowadays out perform hand written assembly. Further more in commercial software development time is pretty much the most important factor. If you could do in 1 day same thing that would ta
Writing the single biggest bottleneck in asm (Score:3, Insightful)
If you could do in 1 day same thing that would take 2 weeks with assembly? The choice is clear.
Unless the two weeks of hand-tweaking the assembly language code of your program's single biggest bottleneck would reduce your program's system requirements so that twice as many users can use it. Such a case is reportedly common in video game development, where the increased revenue is often worth it.
Not to mention concerns about portability
"Portability" has more than one meaning. There's portability of the code, or its suitability for execution in multiple environments whose hardware isn't compatible. For this, you can keep a fallback implementa
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Yeah, us assholes with +10 years experience developing web applications are just a bunch of "noobs" because we never needed to learn Assembler or C. Enjoy spending two weeks developing what would take me an hour.
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For a given amount of time, in almost all cases you can deliver a faster end program by writing in C and possibly optimizing some parts in asm, rather than writing everything in asm.
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I've been involved in a number of projects that were prototyped in a scripting language (usually perl or python) and then rewritten in C for performance, with the disappointing result that the C code ran slower. I've also seen the same with C -> assembly a few times.
The explanation is fairly straightforward. The low-level-language experts (including me a few times) may have known their language well, but they'd never looked into the perl/python/cc code to learn the algorithms used there. It turned out
Re:Assembler is High Performance (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a Java developer with 10 years of experience developing enterprise grade server applications. We use Java, like the majority of Fortune 500 companies, because a Java app can be maintained with a development team greater than 1 coder, common memory coding errors and behaviours is avoided, a large API library prevents us from having to re-invent the wheel constantly, and the JVM is battle-tested in large deployments.
But, no, I guess I'm just a kid who doesn't know how to code.
Sounds like a fork... (Score:2)
...though traditional forks do not get started after "friendly" meetings. But it still sounds like one; which is not a very good thing in my opinion.
What they (Facebook) should have done is to combine resources with the PHP folks, then later release a "new" PHP version with this new engine.
This would be dubbed progress by the majority here.
By the way, where are the stats that show how wanting the current PHP engine's speed still is? I want to see some serious comparison.
So is it a fork or isn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like Facebook rewrote PHP and then invited PHP core developers to adopt it as their core development platform? I can't imagine that went over all that well... probably hit a number of them in the pride region. And the article said it is to be released as open source, but failed to mention the license. Will this be some sort of twisted "FriendFace Public License" or some perversion?
This is not what is meant when a party contributes to an open source project. "Here, I rewrote it for you. It's better. Now just throw away everything else you've done and use this." Really?
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HyperPHP, or HPHP (Score:5, Interesting)
According to that article posted recently [slashdot.org] about Facebook's master password being 'Chuck Norris', the project is indeed a compiled PHP that goes by the name of HyperPHP, or HPHP. It will supposedly lower the load on the servers by 80% and speed up things 5x, according to the unnamed source in the original blog post.
Misleading Summary (surprise!) (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA: UPDATE: After sifting through the comments here and elsewhere, I'm inclined to agree with the folks who are saying that Facebook will be introducing some sort of compiler for PHP.
Not a fork. Not as newsworthy as implied.
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If thats so, then they are reinventing wheel, since there is already PHP compiler available, with is also open source: http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php [roadsend.com]
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Compile (Score:2)
Would be nice of there was an option to compile it to say .phpc files like Python. Would be a nice thing for Perl too.
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http://eaccelerator.net/ [eaccelerator.net]
"eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times. "
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http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ [mit.edu]
Worth a look.
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For a recursive Fibonacci calculation, implementing the same algorithm in C
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PHP is a weakly typed language, so for any given operation, the interpreter will have to check the types of the operands and then figure out which operation(s) on the CPU to call to solve it. Also, as it's dynamic, the operand may not even exist yet.
I think Python has basically the same problem. Compiled .pyc files are actually bytecode, like Java. They save the time of the initial interpretation, but do not make the actual execution faster. Then there is also Psyco [wikipedia.org].
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Not just possible but my WAG is that probably not that hard. Yes PHP is dynamic and variables are typed at runtime, but the logic analyzer and parser would figure all that out and then the resulting machine code would be type appropriate.
Internally all interpreters of loosely typed languages have to figure out what the they types are before it can perform the requested operation. One way to speed up loosely type languages is to remove the looseness and force variable and type declaration. This simplifies
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Yes PHP is dynamic and variables are typed at runtime, but the logic analyzer and parser would figure all that out and then the resulting machine code would be type appropriate.
The whole problem is that when typing is dynamic, your variable in your program can have some arbitrary type at runtime, and you can't figure that out in the general case without executing the actual program. Static code analysis goes only so far in this matter.
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Nope. PHP doesn't work that way. Take a function that takes a single parameter $x. That parameter $x can be of any type. You could have three callers, one passing an int, one passing a string, and one passing an array. The function code itself cannot predict that, so the code in the function must be generic enough to handle all three (and more). Since PHP doesn't allow multiple functions with the same name, to implement overloading, you make a method which checks the types of parameters, for example,
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> So, a question to the room - if it's even possible, is there
> any advantage in compiling a dynamic weakly typed language to
> native code?
You don't have to get to native code reap the benefits.
I work on a server-side javascript platform; it pre-compiles the JavaScript to an intermediary token representation. The benefit is measureable, especially with large scripts. The cost is also negligible for trivial scripts.
Actually, that reminds me, that is the same mechanism that Firefox uses to "fast load
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'Overall execution' being faster is a misnomer. The change to bytecode only improves startup time, but what counts is runtime speed. Many of the modern interpreted languages: php, perl, python, ruby, etc, have a just in time compiler that will internally bytecodeify your raw source before execution. Assuming a straight non-optimizing JIT, The actual executing part, running the application will have the same speed running raw source or bytecode.
In the case of an optimizing JIT, then you gain some speed in
Was revealed 3 weeks ago by insider (Score:5, Informative)
What the heck version of PHP were they using? (Score:3, Insightful)
PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top.
This was true in PHP3, but since PHP4, even declaring functions at the bottom of a file, they were still available at the start of a file execution. Everything got compiled in to an intermediate stage before execution.
One man effort (Score:4, Insightful)
So there is one guy at Facebook doing this PHP rewrite. It must be possible to figure out who he is. Have they hired any high profile PHP developers?
VM's (Score:2, Interesting)
PHP is slow (check), now what.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not just stash your farm of slow php systems behind some heavy duty caching appliance(s)?
Something like aicache might fit the bill.
Re:PHP is slow (check), now what.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not just stash your farm of slow php systems behind some heavy duty caching appliance(s)?
Something like aicache might fit the bill.
When your application is with each iteration generating more content dynamically than it was before (and you want to continue down that route), the benefit of caching starts to drop quite quickly.
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Facebook does as much caching as it can - I mean, they're not daft. They're probably the world's greatest experts on large scale MySQL + memcached.
But sometimes cached data isn't good enough. Facebook users expect their statuses, messages and comments to reach their friends within seconds.
Facebook's architecture is the problem, not PHP (Score:2)
.
I am sure we will be hearing all about how successful this project is, but is the auccessful application of a band-aid really the long-t
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If you read the article, it sounds like it might be more than just an accelerator.
Re:Facebook's architecture is the problem, not PHP (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm no PHP fan but I won't be surprised if FB decided that optimizing the interpreter and investing resources in new functionality is a better business decision than investing in a giant rewrite of what they have now. That would effectively stop them for many months in the best case, or double their costs as a team keeps adding features to the PHP architecture and another one plays catch-up in another language. But maybe they also have some plan to rewrite some core components in a faster language, like twitter did porting the backend tasks from Ruby to Scala.
We could say that they started with the wrong technology but using PHP Zuckerberg was able to deliver what turned out to be a successful product back in 2004. Had he wrote it in Java he could have missed a window of opportunity and people could be using some different social network now. Same logic applies to twitter's choice of Ruby, which by the way they still use for the frontend. Many recent interpreted languages (I'm thinking about Ruby) trade execution speed for speed of coding and delivering products. Many products totally fail and many others don't get so successful to need optimizations so IMHO speed of delivery is the key factor: deliver, get customers, get money and only then we'll think about making our servers run fast.
Ah... If only FB's new interpreter could access instance variables without that redundant $this-> construct that clutters all OO PHP code...
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Instead of putting a band-aid on the current architecture
But that's exactly how you run a successful system.
1) Design product to meet needs of your audience
2) Design the implementation that you think will handle the load the best (with lots of load testing and simulations to make sure it meets expected demand)
3) Build product
4) Watch it behave in the wild... Realize that actual demand is considerably higher than expected demand and will continue to grow
5) Performance slows with more users... you need a solution that will the push the date of catastrophic overload
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The key architectural performance issues in large web apps like Facebook are about scalability by clustering and parallelism and caching... usage of proper higher-level languages helps in this (think how pure-functional programming removes shared state and Google's mapreduce for example), while using a lower-level language may give a speedup on single individual machines but makes the architectural problems harder to tackle.
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By rewriting their entire codebase, a codebase that has invested it in likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions of manhours in debugging, testing, etc, thus representing millions of dollars worth of IP.
Yeah. Good call. Clearly you're *way* smarter than the guys running Facebook...
BTW, where's your website that's used by millions of users daily?
Yeah. Thought so.
They should spend more on the upload tool (Score:4, Interesting)
That thing is a broken buggy piece of garbage. Any time I go out to an event or something and want to upload anything more than half a dozen photos, it inevitably blows up on random photos for no reason (completely fresh off the camera unedited photos). I have to babysit the upload and instead of just hitting select all and letting it go, I end up having to upload it in chunks of 5 photos at a time.
Re:They should spend more on the upload tool (Score:5, Interesting)
For PHP this is the APC Cache module. You send an id with your file upload form then "Load that page using that ID" till the progress gets to 100%. According to the docs the module can poll at a period of "0 seconds" meaning as fast as possible. This halves upload speed.
On the client end, the old HTML way(no feedback) was a simple form with a submitted page. If you arrive at the submit page then the upload worked. The new way is 50-60k of javascript, which is a collection of fragile code. Yahoo's GUI upload for example. Try moding their code and your GUI *will* fail. The file may or may not upload.
br Given the modern web is *all about* uploading user submitted media, I am amazed there arent headlines "Mozilla forgets everything and rebuilds file upload in partnership with Apache...then thinks about HTML 5"
Re:They should spend more on the upload tool (Score:5, Informative)
Scale your photos down to 604x453, which is the size Facebook displays them at, and you will get to control the sharpness and image quality.
Upload at any other size, and Facebook will re-sample them with some very cheap algorithm and apply aggressive compression and they will look like ass.
Try it, you'll be amazed how much better your photos suddenly look.
I normally use "convert -strip -sharpen 0.3 -quality 85 -geometry 604x604" before uploading - it just takes a second, and makes a huge difference.
Resin Quercus (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In summary:
It is OpenSource, 100% Java and it brings all the advantages of using a JVM to PHP - performance (JIT), Safety, Scalability (clustering/load balancing), quality tools (Development, Profilers). One can use most of the Java technologies in PHP to ease development even further - XA Transactions, JNDI, Connection pooling, object caching for example.
Besides, improving performance
Re: (Score:2)
Caucho Resin has a mostly pluggable replacement for PHP which is written in Java. It adds web friendly features to PHP like distributed sessions and load balancing. Given the JVM JIT is already plenty fast and the benchmarks show that Java/PHP beats regular PHP handily - I wonder if Facebook considered using it at some point.
The main problem is lack of support for some of the quite popular extensions that are widely used in PHP apps. Just looking over the list of what's supported and what isn't, I find qui
Akamai sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_gotten_correct_grammar [answers.com]
Can't you?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah my position is pretty indefensible isn't it! Still, that past participle just sounds awful to my British ears! I just haven't gotten used to it yet!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Grammar snobs have sex too!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"Java" and ".Net" as an inspiration? No, thank (Score:5, Insightful)
Speed of "Java" and ".Net"? Is it a joke?
No, it's not.
"Java" hangs all the time
No it doesn't.
and the ".Net" code to do a simple task is so convoluted that it is just ridiculous.
No, it's not.
Honestly, you really have no fucking clue what you're talking about, do you?