This is a talk that I gave at the Northeast PHP conference in Boston, MA on 8/11/12.

1. August 11th, 2012
High Performance PHP
Northeast PHP 2012
Jonathan Klein
jonathan.n.klein@gmail.com
@jonathanklein

2. Agenda
Who am I?
Why Performance Matters
Profiling PHP Applications
Code Level Optimizations
Big Wins
Load Testing
Takeaways

3. Introduction
• Web Performance Platform Lead at Wayfair
• Boston Web Performance Meetup Group Organizer
• Led a team that converted most of Wayfair’s storefront
codebase from Classic ASP to PHP.
1. Rewrote ~100,000 lines of code
• Wayfair Stats:
1. 450 reqs/sec for dynamic content (PHP pages)
2. 1600 reqs/sec for static content (including CDN)
3. Codebase has > 400,000 lines of PHP (some is 3rd party)
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4. The Value of Performance

6. Real World Examples
• Firefox: -2.2 seconds = 15.4% more downloads
• Shopzilla: -5 seconds = 7-12% increase in revenue
• Google: +400ms = 0.76% fewer searches
• Amazon: +100ms = -1% revenue
http://www.phpied.com/the-performance-business-pitch/
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7. 80/20 Rule
80% of page load time takes place on the
client
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8. We’re going to talk about the other 20%

9. A fast page load is 2 seconds
This means you have 400ms to get that HTML off
your server

10. But network time could be ~100ms
This means you have 400ms 300ms to build the
page

11. The average length of an eye blink
is 100-400 milliseconds
Full Page Load – 2 Seconds
Base HTML – 400ms
Server Generation Time – 300ms

12. Profiling PHP Applications
Monitoring and Tracing

13. Monitoring/Tracing Tools
• Paid:
1. Tracelytics (bought by AppNeta)
2. AppDynamics (building a PHP solution)
3. dynaTrace (building a PHP solution
4. New Relic
• Free:
1. StatsD/Graphite
2. Xdebug
3. Nagios
4. Ganglia
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14. Monitoring/Tracing Tools
• Paid:
1. Tracelytics (bought by AppNeta)
2. AppDynamics (building a PHP solution)
3. dynaTrace (building a PHP solution
4. New Relic
• Free:
1. StatsD/Graphite
2. Xdebug
3. Nagios
4. Ganglia
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15. StatsD
UDP Packets – extremely low overhead
<?php
$start = microtime(true);
…script content…
$end = microtime(true);
MyStats::timing('foo.bar', $end - $start);
?>
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/
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16. Graphite
• Written by Orbitz
• Real-time graphing engine for StatsD data (among other things)
• http://graphite.wikidot.com/
• Architecture: http://www.aosabook.org/en/graphite.html
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20. Xdebug
• PHP extension (need to install) - http://xdebug.org/
• Code level tracing
1. Exposes hotspots
• Significant overhead, use in DEV only!
• Add ?XDEBUG_PROFILE=true to a URL
• View results:
1. kcachegrind on linux
2. wincachegrind on Windows
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25. Lesson: Profile Your Code

26. Code Level Optimizations

27. Writing Efficient PHP
• Set max value before loop:
$max = count($rows);
for ($i = 0; $i < $max; $i++) {
echo $i;
}
• require_once() is slow
• Minimize use of define()
• Yes, single quotes are slightly faster than double
quotes
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28. Almost Every Micro-Optimization is
Worthless

29. http://phpbench.com/

30. http://phpbench.com/

31. http://phpbench.com/

32. Writing Efficient PHP
• Set the max loop value before the loop:
$max = count($rows);
for ($i = 0; $i < $max; $i++) {
echo $i;
}
Okay, this one is pretty good
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34. So Why Even Mention
Micro-Optimizations?

36. Lesson: Focus on the Big Wins
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”
- Donald Knuth

37. Big Wins

38. Upgrade PHP
5.3 is ~20% faster than 5.2
http://news.php.net/php.internals/36484
5.4 is ~20-40% faster than 5.3
http://news.php.net/php.internals/57760
Upgrading 5.2  5.4 gives a 45-70%
improvement!
http://php.net/migration53
http://php.net/migration54
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39. PHP 5.4 is 5 Times Faster than PHP4
http://static.zend.com/topics/White-paper-PHP4-PHP5.pdf

40. Use APC (Correctly)
APC – Alternative PHP Cache
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41. Opcode Cache Performance
• Vanilla settings  30-40% improvement
• Turn off APC Stat  additional ~2x
improvement!
-- Understand what is happening here
http://www.slideshare.net/vortexau/improving-php-application-performance-with-apc-
presentation
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42. APC User Cache
<?php
$bar = 'Hello World!';
apc_store('foo', $bar);
?>
<?php
var_dump(apc_fetch('foo'));
?>
-------- Output --------
string(12) "Hello World!"
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43. APC User Cache Optimizations
• Avoid fragmentation - keep utilization under 10%
1. Assign 1GB, only fill 100MB
• Compress objects that are > 10KB before storing
• Reduce garbage collection in the source of
apc_store()
• Consider CDB
1. http://engineering.wayfair.com/moving-constants-out-of-apc-and-into-cdb/
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44. Caching
• Avoid hitting the database
• Cache in APC/Memcached
• 1:00 tomorrow: “Caching With Memcached”
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45. Fix All Errors
• PHP 5.3: E_ALL | E_STRICT
• PHP 5.4: E_ALL
• Can also do error_reporting(-1);
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46. Child Processes
• 4-6 processes per CPU core.
• Beyond that just add servers.
(Test your app)
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47. HipHop for PHP
• Developed/Open Sourced by Facebook
• Transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++
• Reduces CPU for Facebook’s servers by 50%
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-for-php--move-fast/
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php
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48. Load Testing

49. JMeter
• Open Source
• Generate load via a GUI or command line
• Can watch req/s peak out
• Easy to use (just make sure you set the
correct path to Java on your computer).
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55. Be Careful
• JMeter looks a lot like a DOS attack
• Make sure you know what is failing
• Look at monitoring while test is running
• Run in Production
• Run a test, make a change, run it again
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56. Takeaways

57. “How Fast Is Your Site?”

58. This is a terrible question

59. Why is it terrible?
• Lack of context
• Are we talking about average or a percentile?
• Server side time or client?
• Who is measuring it?
• When is it being measured?
• Real users or synthetic?
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60. We still have to answer it

61. Pick Tight SLAs
“The homepage of our site will load in
<300ms at the 80th percentile, measured
by sampling 10% of our real users over a
24 hour period every day at 8AM.”
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62. Pick Tight SLAs
“The homepage of our site will load in
<300ms at the 80th percentile, measured
by sampling 10% of our real users over a
24 hour period every day at 8AM.”
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63. Things to Remember
1. Measure and monitor your application
2. Focus on big wins
3. Run the latest (stable) version of PHP
4. Make sure you are using APC correctly
5. It’s always the database: go to “The Proper Care
and Feeding of a MySQL Database” talk
6. Caching is your friend: go to the “Caching With
Memcached” talk
7. Know what system resources you depend on
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64. There is a lot more

65. Get In Touch
http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-Boston/
wayfair.com/careers
jonathan.n.klein@gmail.com
@jonathanklein
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