HHVM is a just-in-time compiler and bytecode interpreter created by Facebook to execute PHP code faster than traditional PHP implementations. The document discusses efforts to make HHVM fully compatible with Magento, including over 100 bug fixes contributed back to HHVM. Benchmarks show HHVM providing a large performance boost for Magento sites. Caching solutions can still be used with HHVM to further improve performance.

1. Magento on
HHVM
Speeding up your webshop with a drop-in PHP
replacement.

2. Daniel Sloof
https://twitter.com/daniel_sloof
https://github.com/danslo
dsloof@engineyard.com

3. What is HHVM?
● HipHop Virtual Machine
● Created by engineers at Facebook
● Essentially a reimplementation of PHP
● Originally translated PHP to C++, now
translates PHP to bytecode
● Just-in-time compiler, turning generated
bytecode into machine code
● In some cases 5 to 10 times faster than
regular PHP

4. Bytecode compilation
● PHP5 style bytecode Yes
Modified? Invalidate cache
Compile to
Bytecode
Run Bytecode
No
execution
● APC-like caching of
bytecode
● Performance is quite
similar to Zend PHP

5. Just In Time Compiler
Modified?
Have
Native?
Hot?
Invalidate Cache
Compile to
Bytecode
Compile to Native Run Bytecode
Run Native
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes No

6. What was the problem?
● HHVM not entirely compatible with PHP
● Magento’s PHP triggering many of these
incompatibilities
● Choosing between
○ Forking Magento to work around HHVM
○ Fixing issues within the extensive HHVM C++
codebase

7. Resulted in... fixing HHVM
● Already over 100 commits fixing Magento
related HHVM bugs;
○ SimpleXML (majority of bugfixes)
○ sessions
○ number_format
○ __get and __set
○ many more...
● Most of these fixes already merged back into
the official (github) repository
Activity for the HHVM project on github in June
● Still actively “Of the top involved 15 contributors, and only 9 are committed facebook employees.”
to make
HHVM a good place for Magento

8. What that means for Magento...
● Community and Enterprise Editions running
stable.
● Passes near 100% of the Test Automation
Framework.
● Large boost in improvement.
● Works with FastCGI, so keep most of your
current web-configuration, rewrites, etc.

9. Benchmarks
Before we go to the results...
● Magento 1.9 with sample data
● Standard nginx / php-fpm / percona stack
(with PHP 5.5 opcode cache)
● Standard HHVM configuration (repo-authoritative
mode disabled, JIT enabled)
● Tool of choice: siege

10. Benchmarks: Response time
Average across 50 requests

11. Benchmarks: Transaction rate
While increasing siege concurrency until avg.
response time ~2 seconds

12. What about
<insert caching solution here>?
● HHVM does not get in the way
● Dynamic content still needs to be generated
● Replaces PHP - not Varnish, Redis, FPC,
Block Cache, etc.
● As long as you are burning CPU cycles
(always), you will benefit from HHVM
● Think about speeding up indexing, order
placement, routing, etc.

13. What about PHPNG / PHP7?
● Better performance than PHP5.5, but still
trails behind HHVM quite significantly.
● Not production ready.
http://goo.gl/MyUBeu

14. How do we know it is stable?
● Unfortunately there are no unit tests for
(core) Magento 1.x
● Brushed up the Test Automation Framework
● Automated setup of test environment using
Chef
● Nightly builds to check Magento compatibility
on HHVM to make it easier to spot
regressions
● Open-sourced very soon

15. What about the future?
● Facebook is committed to open source:
several employees work on it exclusively.
● HHVM tracks a number of popular
frameworks and runs their PHPUnit suites
● Magento 2 is part of that list
http://hhvm.com/frameworks/

16. What is Hack?
Moving to HHVM gets even more awesome.
● Statically typed language
● Type annotations
● Generics
● Async
● Lambda’s
● Collections
● Built-in user attributes

17. Can we gradually migrate?
Store not entirely compatible with HHVM and
still want to run it.
● Problem is isolated to a (subset of) page(s):
use web-server configuration to split load.
● Problem is more widespread (incompatible
global observers, ioncube, etc):
https://github.com/danslo/HiphopIndexer/

18. On the topic of debugging
● HHVM comes with something called HPHPd
● CLI Based, comparable to GDB
● No (known) support for any IDEs
Latest stable release
has xdebug support!

19. Where can we run it?
Leading platform for merchants and dev shops
running high performance Magento apps in the
cloud
● Highly optimized Magento PaaS
● 24/7 white glove DevOps support
● Over 1 billion hours deployed on AWS
https://www.engineyard.com/magento

20. Thank you!
Questions?