lesterchan.net on HHVM

After the move to nginx/php-fpm, the next natural course of action is to move to HHVM and php-fpm as a fallback.

What is HHVM?

HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development flexibility that PHP provides. HHVM is developed by Facebook.

As a result my response time drop by another 400ms to about 1,500ms from 1,900ms as shown in the screenshot below.

Installing HHVM

$ apt-get install software-properties-common $ apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0x5a16e7281be7a449 $ add-apt-repository 'deb http://dl.hhvm.com/ubuntu trusty main' $ apt-get update $ apt-get install hhvm

nginx’s HHVM config (hhvm.conf)


location ~ \.(hh|php)$ {
    proxy_intercept_errors on;
    error_page 502 = @fallback;

    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    if (!-f $document_root$fastcgi_script_name) {
        return 404;
    }

    fastcgi_keep_conn on;

    include fastcgi_params;

    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/hhvm/server.sock;
}
location @fallback {
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    if (!-f $document_root$fastcgi_script_name) {
        return 404;
    }

    include fastcgi_params;

    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}

HHVM config (server.ini)
I am running HHVM through a file socket.