Download the Complete (and free, as in open source free) Aesop + HPHP files from right here.
PHP is my favorite language, bare none. It’s simple, elegant, and fun to use. Problem is, for highly trafficked sites it’s a touch slow and can be quite memory hungry. If you’re Facebook this can lead to problems, which is why they invented Hip Hop PHP (HPHP), a collection of tools and technology that turns our slow and hungry PHP code into lean and mean C++.
Ok, So Just How Fast Is It?
As a quick comparison I created a simple FormBoss form and ran Apache Bench (ab from the command line), to get a sense of the speed difference between Apache 2.2 and HPHP.
The top two tests are when running our simple .php files, the bottom test is when serving a simple 62 byte .xml file with 100 concurrent users:
**It’s important to note these numbers will be lower when running though a network and calling a database. Also, while other servers like Cherokee can be twice as fast as Apache, HPHP is still nearly twice as fast again.
So yes, qualifications aside, HPHP is very fast indeed.
Sure these numbers are fantastic, but using HPHP means compiling the source from scratch and then using a series of command-line switches to run and manage the compiled PHP code.
No longer–In my spare time I’ve created and now released an open-source front-end UI to HPHP.
Read on to learn more, or just download the files!
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