PHP's popularity and simplicity made it easy for the company's developers to quickly build new features. But PHP's (lack of) performance makes scaling Facebook's site to handle hundreds of billions of page views a month problematic, so Facebook has made big investments in making it leaner and faster. The latest product of those efforts is the HipHop VM (HHVM), a PHP virtual machine that significantly boosts performance of dynamic pages . And Facebook is sharing it with the world as open-source.
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Member since:2011-01-28
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Part of the problem, and no small part, is that most web developers couldn't design a relational database if their life depended on it. Normalize? Wazzat? Just use incrementing serials always, everywhere. Relations? No, I'm single and do my database consistency in the code.
Edited 2011-12-15 11:45 UTC
Member since:2009-05-19
Most Java applications, in my experience, running in a web environment are horrible, simply horrible, memory hogs. I can think of many examples, commercial and internally developed that fit this description!
Maybe it's not Java's fault per-se, but the toolkits, or the methodology behind them, I really don't know (or care), but I cannot hope to recall the amount of times Tomcat has balked because it's run out of resources. Servers running this software nearly always need more ram, and more cpu than their PHP/Apache2 counterparts.
Maybe the VM powering PHP really is that much slower, but when considering the complete stack to deliver content to the web, PHP is a much better option if you actually care about reliability and, I think, user-perceived performance.
Just my 2 cents...
Member since:2011-01-28
Dr Mabuse,
"Most Java applications, in my experience, running in a web environment are horrible, simply horrible, memory hogs. I can think of many examples, commercial and internally developed that fit this description!"
I can sure vouch for this indirectly. I needed to work on some Java code with some special version of eclipse IDE which consumed no less than 500MB of ram. We thought something was wrong, but the vendor said it was normal and within specs. I needed more ram installed in my employer-provided computer.
Of course, as you say it may not indicate a problem with Java per say, but yikes...
Anyways, some people have done the benchmarks for memory too so we can speak a little more intelligently about it:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=...
"Maybe the VM powering PHP really is that much slower, but when considering the complete stack to deliver content to the web, PHP is a much better option if you actually care about reliability and, I think, user-perceived performance."
I think it's largely developer preference and skill.
Java forced exceptions caused a lot of friction with developers who simply wanted exceptions to bubble up until they were caught or the program aborted itself. Without a Java IDE to insert code templates, calling exception throwing functions was uniquely painful. Java invented a new problem that no other languages had. It would have been much better handled as a compiler warning. This was the deciding factor in my personal projects to avoid java despite wanting to use it for it's other qualities.
PHP is a global heap of inconsistent functions with a long history of semantic incompatibility between versions. PHP designers were clearly not qualified to build the language that would become the standard web platform for the internet. They can be credited for the development of anti-features such as \"magic quotes\" and "=== I really mean it" equality.
PHP's strong point is online documentation, they've done an excellent job making things very easy to learn how to do. I think many languages are far behind in the documentation dept.
I would like to try other modern languages, but PHP's ubiquity at hosting providers keeps me coming back - it remains top dog because it's top dog.
Edited 2011-12-15 03:12 UTC
Member since:2005-07-08
Maybe it's not Java's fault per-se, but the toolkits, or the methodology behind them, I really don't know (or care), but I cannot hope to recall the amount of times Tomcat has balked because it's run out of resources. Servers running this software nearly always need more ram, and more cpu than their PHP/Apache2 counterparts.
Usually the fault is the programmers.
Most of the time when I see bad Java code, it is caused by developers that learned to program Java on the job while putting to production the first thing they managed to compile.
But this is not Java specific, I see this a lot when we need to rescue projects done by wannabe developers,
regardless of the programming language being used.
Member since:2007-03-26
However that said, PHP is extremely inefficient. It's worse than java or .net by a factor of roughly 100 according to the "average" row in the following benchmark:
http://www.csharp-architect.com/images/benchmarksJan2009Final.gif
So, with some hand-waiving, we'd expect a VM version of PHP to significantly reduce the quantity of PHP servers required to service a given load, and the excess servers no longer needed could be redeployed as less heavily loaded database servers.
This makes a lot of sense for an entity like facebook and shared hosting providers where they run servers at max capacity.
I can't see any figures for PHP in that gif.
I'd also be interested to see PHP compared against CGI, mod_perl and Python.
Member since:2011-01-28
Laurence,
"I can't see any figures for PHP in that gif."
The table up at the top. I don't really understand why they were omitted from the graph. Anyways I posted another source with an interactive language by language comparison.
.Net and Java were fairly similar, Perl was often better than PHP, but interpreted languages across the board were at least a magnitude slower than native ones.
Ideally, all languages would have native JIT compilers so that performance would no longer be such a crucial factor between them.
Member since:2005-07-06
However that said, PHP is extremely inefficient. It's worse than java or .net by a factor of roughly 100 according to the "average" row in the following benchmark:
http://www.csharp-architect.com/images/benchmarksJan2009Final.gif
So, with some hand-waiving, we'd expect a VM version of PHP to significantly reduce the quantity of PHP servers required to service a given load, and the excess servers no longer needed could be redeployed as less heavily loaded database servers.
This makes a lot of sense for an entity like facebook and shared hosting providers where they run servers at max capacity.
Those functions in the benchmark, how often is PHP required to do computationally complex operations? Most of the time it's rendering HTML and pulling data from or pushing into a database. Very simple stuff. We're not calculating Pi to the millionth digit or calculating jump coordinates with PHP. I can't imagine you see any difference in a basic web page with a DB back-end using PHP or compiled C.
And Java has always seemed slower to me in implementation. Such a resource hog, and what's worse as a sysadmin I have very little idea of what's going on inside the Java engine. Neither do the developers, either it seems. So when stuff goes wrong, it goes way wrong.
Member since:2011-01-28
tony,
"Those functions in the benchmark, how often is PHP required to do computationally complex operations?"
Consider things like dynamically generated graphics (like captcha). If PHP is the wrong language for that, what is the right language? Is that language available in your hosting package?
Most PHP pages do very little at a time, like maintaining shopping carts and constructing SQL strings, but aggregately the inefficiencies do add up, especially when the level of inefficiency is great.
I'm a little surprised that I'm the only soul here who seems to care about language efficiency. Oh well, it's a sign of the times.
Member since:2007-09-22
Member since:2011-01-28
Lennie,
"No large website uses stock PHP, they atleast use a bytecode cache like APC/eaccelerator/xcache and a cluster of memcached servers to not hit the database servers to do read-queries. Maybe a NOSQL solution like redis or whatever."
You're probably right, but so what? Even small shared-hosting web sites could benefit from the higher performance.
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Member since:
2011-01-28
Well, the front end PHP servers are usually (always?) stateless, which means they can be scaled trivially by running clusters of mirrored web servers in parallel. The same sort of scalability is not nearly as trivial for databases, and for that reason they tend to be much more problematic.
However that said, PHP is extremely inefficient. It's worse than java or .net by a factor of roughly 100 according to the "average" row in the following benchmark:
http://www.csharp-architect.com/images/benchmarksJan2009Final.gif
So, with some hand-waiving, we'd expect a VM version of PHP to significantly reduce the quantity of PHP servers required to service a given load, and the excess servers no longer needed could be redeployed as less heavily loaded database servers.
This makes a lot of sense for an entity like facebook and shared hosting providers where they run servers at max capacity.