Hi,
Opening discussion/reporting about code optimisation, compatibility and some thoughts since Islandora is and will continue to be PHP.
For the last weeks i have been working trying to squeeze as much speed from a Islandora/Fedora 3 installation with some very interesting results (using Varnish with dual backends, x cache tags, opcode cache in php, memcached, etc).
Even when having a very flexible caching stack can improve islandora/drupal performance to incredible numbers for anonymous users, like less than 100ms average for a 50 thumbs collection listing using ab tool, there are certain, admin tasks, that can't be cached as good/safely as i would like (there are some tricks, but out of scope here)
So i thought, since i'm using php 5.5.9 already, why not test some php side optimisations, by using alternatives to official PHP and also shiny new PHP7 which is blazing fast.
My first test with HHVM where pretty impressive. HHVM is the Facebook alternative to php (
http://hhvm.com/) , which performs very good for heavy code tasks. For simple scripts, difference is none, even sometimes a few ms slower, but for
heavy processing code(someone said XML?) the numbers are very fine, very fine indeed.
PHP7 . Mayor change. Faster than PHP-FPM and could even surpass HHVM.
Still have to go through all the compat notes and our code before testing, but looks promising.
That all said, some mind notes:
Should we consider moving to PHP 7 (coding standards, practices) in Islandora Claw? The whole idea of going slow (apart of lacking more developer time of course, which is not and idea, but a reality) is to be able to make long time decision that are good for the community. Fast is good?
Symphony is PHP 7 compatible, Silex runs fine under PHP 7. Drupal 7 some stuff fails, Drupal 8 somehow, mostly, but tests pass (D8 is slower than Drupal 7, but other discussion, does not mean it's the only implication on deciding which one is better)
PHP 5.x is slow. Very slow. so slow. slow
Would love on other people experiences, opinions. Maybe i'm obsessed with performance.
Thanks!