Zend Server: Scalability & Performance

Zend Server: Scalability & Performance By Shahahr Evron Technical Product Manager, Zend Technologies

Welcome! I am: ▶ A PHP programmer since 2002 ▶ At Zend since 2005 ▶ Technical Product Manager for Zend Server Yes, I have a difficult name (at least for English speakers) ▶ Shachar (German, Dutch) ▶ Shajar (Spanish) ▶ Шахар (Russian) ▶ ‫( ﺷﺨﺮ‬Arabic) ▶ ‫( שחר‬Hebrew) 2

Agenda ▶ What is Zend Server? ▶ Performance and Scalability ▶ Zend Server's approach to performance ▶ Out of the box performance: Optimizer+ ▶ Setting it up to run faster ▶ Caching, Caching, Caching ▶ Task off-loading and off-line processing 3

What is Zend Server? ...and why should I care? 4

...Well, Just ask your friend at marketing! “Zend Server is a complete, enterprise- ready Web Application Server for running and managing PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance and security.” 5

Let's try to make sense out of that.. Zend Server Is: ▶ A complete, well tested PHP runtime environment ▶ Supported and updated by Zend ▶ Comes with a set of extra features that: ● Improve the performance and reliability of PHP applications ● Make it easier to manage a consistent PHP environment Comes in two flavors: ▶ Zend Server ▶ Zend Server Community Edition 6

Performance & Scalability Some terminology 7

What performance are we talking about? Improving an application's performance can mean: ▶ Making it run faster ● More requests per second on the server side ● Less load time on the user side ▶ Making it run more efficiently ● Use less memory / CPU / disk IO / network bandwidth ● Distribute load evenly over time / hardware These are not always the same, and setting goals is important! 8

What about Scalability? Scalability can mean different things: ▶ Ability to gracefully handle more users ▶ Ability to gracefully handle more data ▶ Ability to gracefully handle more code Scalability can be improved by performance optimizations... ▶ But they are not the same, and sometimes even conflict! 9

Zend Server's approach to Performance 10

Comprehensive Performance A Web App's performance depends on many factors... ▶ Network ▶ Web server load ▶ PHP processing time ▶ Database load ▶ Application logic ▶ ...? ...that is why improving your applications performance will require applying a range of measures ▶ Zend Server provides a set of different tools to help you do that! 11

It's just a series of tubes, right? 12

Out of the box performance Performance 101 13

Opcode Caching and Optimization Zend Server includes Optimizer+: ▶ PHP Opcode is read once from disk and compiled ▶ The compiled opcode goes through a set of optimizations ▶ The optimized opcode is stored in shared memory ● No need to read from disk again unless the code changes ● No need to compile the code on each request / file inclusion ● Optimized code potentially executes faster ▶ Works out of the box, no setup needed! ● Can be made even better with some tuning :) 14

How Optimizer+ Works? 15

Optimizer+: A quick Benchmark Bare PHP Optimizer+ 50 45.55 45 41.73 40 35 30 25 20 15 13.96 12.69 10 5.3 5 2.24 0 Magento Drupal SugarCRM CE 18

Setting it up to run faster Tuning tips 19

Tuning Zend Server for Performance Zend Server comes with a default “good for all” setup ▶ You should go over the performance guide when moving to production! Some things you should definitely do: ▶ Turn off extensions you don't need ▶ Tune PHP configuration ▶ Tune Zend Monitoring Rules 20

Turn off extensions you don't need Why load extensions you don't use? ▶ Per-process memory can be reduced ▶ Less work at MINIT and possibly at RINIT / RSHUTDOWN ▶ Generally a good security practice A quick test on per-process Apache memory usage shows: ▶ With 55 extensions: 9.3mb ▶ With 31 extensions: 7.2mb ● Almost 30% more concurrent requests on an average machine! Of course, you must know what can be turned off... 21

Tune PHP configuration Many PHP directives can be optimized for performance ▶ Those have relatively small effect ▶ ...but they are easy to fix, and you should know them! Here are some examples: ▶ include_path, realpath_cache_size, realpath_cache_ttl ▶ output_buffering ▶ register_long_arrays, register_argc_argv ▶ magic_quotes_gpc ▶ error_reporting ▶ memory_limit, max_execution_time ▶ session.auto_start 22

Caching, Caching, Caching 23

Caching? “In computer science, a cache is a collection of data duplicating original values stored elsewhere or computed earlier, where the original data is expensive to fetch or to compute, compared to the cost of reading the cache.” -- Wikipedia 24

Caching with Zend Server... Zend Server provides several caching tools ▶ Zend Data Cache ● Disk storage ● Shared memory storage ▶ Zend Page Cache ▶ Common Caching Extensions ● memcache ● APC compatibility layer You can get the best results by combining some or all of those ▶ You can abstract storage backends using ZF's Zend_Cache 25

Page Caching Page Caching allows you to cache full HTTP responses ▶ Super fast! ▶ Based on a rule system – no code changes required ▶ Cached / live decision can be based on request or session data ▶ Variants can be created based on request or session data ▶ Client-side caching is utilized if supported by browser Setting it up requires some careful planning ...but the performance gains are usually worth the effort 26

Page Caching 27

Page Cache: A Quick Drupal Benchmark Caching node pages for guest users ▶ Can be done with no effort using a SESSION based rule ▶ Much better results can be achieved using a COOKIE based rule ● ...no need to run code up to session_start 700 589.26 600 500 400 300 201.17 200 100 21.94 0 No Cache Session Rule Other Rule 28

Data Caching Zend Server's Data Caching API allows you to: ▶ Programatically place data items into cache ● And also get them and delete them ;) ▶ Use shared memory or disk storage as needed ▶ Organize cached items into namespaces ▶ Clear cached content from Zend Server's UI Data Caching more of a “precision guided” caching tool ▶ Requires code changed (but is easy to use) ▶ Not as effective performance wise as Page Cache ▶ Very flexible 29

Data Caching function getRecentPosts($count = 5) { // Try to fetch from the cache first $recentPosts = zend_shm_cache_fetch('recentposts-' . $count); if ($recentPosts === false) { // Get the PDO adapter for the DB $dbAdapter = myBlogDb::getPdoAdapter(); // Build the query $query = "SELECT title, author, pubdate FROM posts ORDER BY pubdate DESC LIMIT ?"; $dbStatement = $dbAdapter->prepare($query); // Execute the query $recentPosts = array(); if ($dbStatement->execute(array($count))) { while($post = $dbStatement->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) { $recentPosts[] = $post; } // Store the results in cache zend_shm_cache_store('recentposts-' . $count, $recentPosts, 24 * 3600); } } return $recentPosts; } Read more: http://devzone.zend.com/article/4457 Or just Google “Zend Server Caching Guide” 30

Off-line processing & Task off-loading Why do now the stuff you can do later? 31

Job Queue Off-line processing? ▶ Web applications tend to “live” in HTTP request/response cycles ▶ What do you do when you need to take something off-line? ▶ What do you do when you need periodical execution? It's also a matter of user experience: ▶ Sometimes, it's just silly to let the user wait Zend Server Job Queue allows you to take it off-line! ▶ Run things asynchronously, later, on a different server ▶ Run things periodically 32

So is it some glorified Cron? No! ▶ You can run things now, but without waiting for them to finish ▶ You can run things once, but not right now ▶ You can run things periodically (like cron) ● But have full control over them – start, stop, suspend, resume from PHP API ▶ Job Queue gives you full visibility into what's going on ● Get alerts on failed jobs, analyze errors and re-queue ● Keep track of past, current and pending jobs ● Integrates with Zend Monitor ▶ You don't need to hack it all to work for you 33

Job Queue – a Common Execution Flow 34

Job Queue – a Common Execution Flow 35

Job Queue Front-end code: if (GlobalConfig::get('useJobQueue')) { // Use job queue to off-load email sending $params = array( 'recipients' => $recipients, 'message' => $message ); $queue = new ZendJobQueue(); $queue->createHttpJob('http://localhost/mail/job.php', $params); } else { // No job queue, send emails directly send_mail($recipients, $message); } 36

Job Queue Back-end code: $params = ZendJobQueue::getCurrentJobParams(); if (isset($params['recipients']) && isset($params['message'])) { send_mail($params['recipients'], $params['message']); ZendJobQueue::setCurrentJobStatus(ZendJobQueue::OK); } else { ZendJobQueue::setCurrentJobStatus(ZendJobQueue::FAILURE, "Missing recipients list or message"); } 37

Job Queue Baseline Job Queue 140 128.81 127.82 128.61 120 100 80 60 40 20 9.39 3.38 1.5 0 1 recipient 3 recipients 6 recipients 38

Zend Download Server Quick & Easy Apache Efficiency 39

What is Zend Download Server If you use Apache in Prefork mode: ▶ Each process handles one request at a time ▶ Your server's # of processes is limited (usually by RAM) ▶ Once your server's processes are maxed, you have a problem! Solutions: ▶ Add more hardware (← last resort!) ▶ Switch to a threaded web server + FastCGI PHP ● lighttpd, optimized threaded Apache, nginx etc. ▶ Off-load static downloads ● To a separate web server, separate machine, CDN / 3rd party storage ▶ Set up Zend Download Server! 40

How does Zend Download Server help? Zend Download Server improves Apache's scalability by: ▶ “Hijacking” static downloads to a separate, efficient process ▶ Freeing Apache processes to do the “hard work” (== PHP) Usage modes: ▶ Can be set up to automatically send specific file types ▶ Can be used through API (zend_send_file, zend_send_buffer) Benefits: ▶ Easy to set up and use, no code changes ▶ Easy to integrate with your PHP app's logic ● e.g. authenticated downloads 41

Epilogue 42

Conclusions 43

Conclusions 44

Conclusions 45

Conclusions 46

Conclusions 47

Conclusions 48

Conclusions 49

Thanks! Email me: shahar.e@zend.com Learn more at http://www.zend.com/server Copyright © 2009 Zend Technologies Ltd. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. 50

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Zend Server: Scalability & Performance

by Shahar Evron

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