Magento Site Performance Optimization
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Caching Them All<br />
HipHop Virtual Machine<br />
HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is the cornerstone of the PHP processing stack of<br />
Facebook and is currently able to increase the number of requests handle by a server<br />
by 9. It is open source and you can download it on GitHub. How does it work? As<br />
we can write a whole book (or two) about HHVM, we will just give the key ideas<br />
here. HHVM is a virtual machine that will translate any called PHP file into a HHVM<br />
byte code in the same spirit as the Java or .NET virtual machine. HHVM transforms<br />
your PHP code into a lower level language that is much faster to execute. Of course,<br />
the transformation time (compiling) does cost a lot of resources, therefore, HHVM is<br />
shipped with a cache mechanism similar to APC. This way, the compiled PHP files<br />
are stored and reused when the original file is requested. With HHVM, you keep<br />
the PHP flexibility and ease in writing, but you now have a performance like that of<br />
C++. Hear the words of the HHVM team at Facebook:<br />
"HHVM (aka the HipHop Virtual Machine) is a new open-source virtual<br />
machine designed for executing programs written in PHP. HHVM uses a justin-time<br />
compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining<br />
the flexibility that PHP developers are accustomed to. To date, HHVM (and its<br />
predecessor HPHPc) has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and<br />
over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the Zend<br />
PHP 5.2 engine + APC.<br />
HHVM can be run as a standalone webserver (in other words, without the Apache<br />
webserver and the "modphp" extension). HHVM can also be used together with a<br />
FastCGI-based webserver, and work is in progress to make HHVM work smoothly<br />
with Apache."<br />
If you think this is too good to be true, you're right! Indeed, HHVM have a major<br />
drawback. HHVM was and still is focused on the needs of Facebook. Therefore, you<br />
might have a bad time trying to use your custom made PHP applications inside it.<br />
Nevertheless, this opportunity to speed up large PHP applications has been seen<br />
by talented developers who improve it, day after day, in order to support more and<br />
more framework. As our interest is in <strong>Magento</strong>, I will introduce you Daniel Sloof<br />
who is a developer from Netherland. More interestingly, Daniel has done (and still<br />
does) an amazing work at adapting HHVM for <strong>Magento</strong>.<br />
Here are the commands to install Daniel Sloof's version of HHVM for <strong>Magento</strong>:<br />
1. $ sudo apt-get install git<br />
2. $ git clone https://github.com/danslo/hhvm.git<br />
3. $ sudo chmod +x configure_ubuntu_12.04.sh<br />
4. $ sudo ./configure_ubuntu_12.04.sh<br />
5. $ sudo CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`pwd`/.. make<br />
[ 70 ]<br />
www.it-ebooks.info
Change language