In theory, by running compiled code, users would get major gains in performance with the same hardware. This is specially true for applications and sites built using frameworks like Symfony, Zend Framework, Cakephp and others. But it also means that you will need to compile the PHP code and upload the result into a server that can understand and run it. In consequence, hosting that will support HipHop be limited.

We have some questions before hand that will get answered pretty soon. How does HipHop compare with running PHP with APC enabled? Since Facebook contributed a lot to APC, we are assuming that using HipHop should be an improvement. We also are very curious to see how it will fare with frameworks like Symfony and Zend Framework.

Here at ServerGrove, our core business is PHP hosting, and as you can imagine that we are very excited about this announcement. As we were one of the first companies to offer PHP 5.3 hosting, we will test HipHop to see what it offers for PHP hosting. Part of our mission is to squeeze every single CPU cycle to offer the best performance from our servers so our customers’ websites run as fast as possible. If HipHop is as good as it sounds, be sure that it will be added to our products offering, but not before making sure we can provide the top-level support that our customers deserve and get from us.

We look forward to hearing your predictions on HipHop. How will symfony and Zend Framework fit in the schema of things? How will this affect our workflow? If HipHop is as good as it sounds, what will be the ultimate hosting product to go with it? Check back soon, as our tests materialize we will post them here.

Then, I decided to run some benchmarks using ab (Apache Benchmark) to see how symfony 1.2 and 1.3 compared. To my surprise, I did not see an improvement on speed. I was expecting the new version would be faster, but for some reason I am not seeing any improvements. I have not gone into speed improvement measures yet, this was just out of curiosity with a symfony project pretty much straight out of the box. And my development box is not fancy or speedy, but for comparing both versions it would be OK.

When I turned on view caching, things really improved, doubling the requests/second rate. I am running PHP 5.3.1 here, so I am using all the new PHP memory handling and speed improvements, which is very good for frameworks since they tend to be heavy users.

Then, since I was already dancing, I dediced to install APC, an free opcode cache. Basically it caches PHP compiled source code so subsequent requests do not have to do the parsing of PHP files. It always improves performance without touching a single line of code. But to my surprise, I got an increase from about 14 requests/sec (remember, this server is not fast at all!) to over 70 requests/sec !!! That’s 5x times faster!

It also includes a nice web page with status and statistics of cached data.

I did not get into more tweaking, but you can see there is a big difference. That’s why all our VPS servers come with APC installed by default, so you can get all the juice from your server. And that’s why you need to use it whenever possible.