Tag Archives: hhvm

Migration completed!

General, , ,

As I told in the previous post, I expressed the will to try running this blog on HHVM. I started transferring from a normal shared hosting to  a very cheap VPS.

Obviously the infrastructure is really updated, in fact I installed HHVM, Nginx 1.5, MariaDB 10. HHVM, among PHP without opcache running on the shared hosting, really boosted WordPress performance. However, I was still unsatisfied.

So I decided to enable SSL on this site, surely not due to top-secret material showed on this site, but becouse this is a requirement to implement SPDY, an HTTP protocol evolution, developed by Google. This protocol enables to really decrease page latency.

I proceeded to refactoring the website, with the will to save everywhere kilobytes e reduce the number of resources to load. Google Pagespeed is really helpful in this situation. It optimizes in real-time all resources. Continue reading →

Facebook rebuilds PHP with HACK e HHVM

HHVM, , ,

HHVMFacebook is probably the largest website running on the PHP platform. This “old” language was created by Rasmus Lerdof as a scripting language to facilitate and to speed website realization in the “far” 1995. Main features were dynamic allocation of variable’s type, and the absence of compilation. To edit file and run the web page is enough.

Clearly, these features, if on one hand make developing more easy and more affordable for a larger community, on the other hand heavily affect performance. The Zend engine (the standard php runner) must detect in every variable usage, its type, and convert it in the right type, depending on the context. As a language can simulate the type absence, at the execution layers it’s not possible. Continue reading →