Till's blog

Since part one and two were uber-successful, here's an update on my Zend Framework PHP performance situation. I've also had this post sitting around since beginning of May and I figured if I don't post it now, I never will.

Disclaimer: All numbers (aka pseudo benchmarks) were not taken on a full moon and are (of course) very relative to our server hardware (e.g. DELL 1950, 8 GB RAM) and environment. The application we run is Zend Framework-based and currently handles between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors per day.

Why switch at all?

In January of this year (2009), we started investigating the 2.2 branch of the Apache webserver. Because we used Apache 1.3 for forever, we never had the need to upgrade to Apache 2.0, or 2.2. After all, you're probably familiar with the don't fix it, if it's not broken-approach.

Late last year we ran into a couple (maybe) rather FreeBSD-specific issues with PHP and its opcode cache APC. I am by no means an expert on the entire situation, but from reading mailing lists and investigating on the server, this seemed to be expected behavior — in a nutshell: Apache 1.3 and a large opcode cache on a newer versions of FreeBSD (7) were bound to fail with larger amounts of traffic.

We tried bumping up a few settings (pv entries), but we just ran into the same issue again and again.

Because the architecture of Apache 2.2 and 1.3 is so different from one another (and upgrading to 2.2 was the proposed solution), I went on to explore this upgrade to Apache 2.2. And once I completed the switch to Apache 2.2, my issues went away.

So far, so good!

Performance?

On the performance side we experienced rather mediocre results.

While we benched that a static file could be read at around 300 requests per second (that is a pretty standard Apache 2.2 install, sans a couple unnecessary modules), PHP (mod_php) performed at a fraction of that, averaging between 20 and 23 requests per second.

Myth: Hardware is cheap(, developer time is not)!

Before some people yell at me for trying to optimize my web server, one needs to take the costs of scaling (to a 100 requests per seconds) into account.

One of those servers currently runs at 2,600.00 USD. The price tag adds up to an additional 10,400.00 USD in order to scale to a 100 (lousy) requests per seconds. Chances are of course, that the hardware is slightly less expensive since DELL gives great rebates — but the 8 GB of (server) RAM and the SAS disks by themselves are melting budgets away.

And on top of all hardware costs, you need add setup, maintenance and running costs (rack space, electricity) for an additional four servers — suddenly, developer time is cheap. ;-)

So what do we do? Nginx to the rescue?!

Mmmhhhh!!! Just kidding of course. ;-)

I'm sure you've already read Ulf Wendel's blog post about the PHP BBQ Tour. And as you noticed, he'll be in town Berlin on the 18th June. What better opportunity is there to come out and share a Bratwurst (or a veggie-dog) with a couple people from the local PHP usergroup, and MySQL Sun (Oracle?) and other known PHP folks such as PHPUnit's Sebastian Bergmann and Mayflower's Bjoern Schotte.

• The date: 18th June, 2009
• The time: from 6 PM
• The place: Cafe Schoenbrunn (map)

So in order to make it easy, we'll hang out at the beer garden at Schoenbrunn. They always have a grill with Bratwurst and Steak going, and you can order food from the menu. Needless to say they do have beer and other drinks.

If you plan on coming, please RSVP in the comments on the designated wiki page!

Looking forward to it!

P.S. If you're not in Berlin, check out Ulf's travel plan. He also visits Munich, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Dortmund, Hamburg and Kiel. Especially the last two places do sound tempting, especially in the summer. :-)

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Auf Deutsch — Ulf Wendel kommt am 18. Juni nach Berlin. Wir treffen uns ab 18 Uhr im Cafe Schoenbrunn (Volkspark Friedrichshain). Dort gibt es einen heissen Grill und Getraenke. Wer eher vegetarische Speisen bevorzugt, kann auch die Speisekarte nutzen.

Bitte kuendigt Eure Teilnahme ueber einen Kommentar in unserem Wiki an!

Bis bald!

Thanks to Wesley, we recently managed to update CouchDB's FreeBSD port to the official 0.9.0 release.

My current TODO for the port includes:

• a super-cool rc-script (currently, there is none)
• automatic user setup/creation (couchdb)
• patching of the install/source to use BSD-style directories for the database (e.g. /var/db/couchdb).

In regard to the the rc-script, I continued on a work in progress and committed an idea on Github. This work in process (couchdb) works out of the box. Just download the file, put it in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/, chmod +x couchdb and done. I also updated the CouchDB wiki page explaining how CouchDB on FreeBSD is setup (e.g. the options of the rc-script) and updated the instructions on user creation — something that I plan to roll into the couchdb port ASAP.

But before I continue on the port, I'd like to ask for feedback from people (Probably, you!) who use CouchDB on FreeBSD. For example, are you happy with the current options, or do you need a different set, etc.. If this work in progress is what you need, then that's valuable feedback as well.

Thanks!

Even though I didn't like the Borat movie very much, I still like to use his line, Great success!. But on to more important things! ;-)

Last weekend, we — the Berlin PHP UserGroup (and Christian Weiske from Leipzig) — took part in what some people labeled the European PHP TestFest 2009. In a nutshell, we were writing tests to cover different PHP extensions.

Here's the outcome (numbers courtesy of Falko Menge):

Extension  Code Coverage    Line Coverage            New Tests
gettext    62.8 -> 98.8 %    54 ->  85 /  86 lines   19
intl/idn   11.6 -> 81.4 %     5 ->  35 /  43 lines    3
sockets    32.9 -> 70.5 %   282 -> 604 / 857 lines   23
posix      47.9 -> 70.0 %   147 -> 215 / 307 lines   16
xsl        67.3 -> 77.1 %   350 -> 401 / 520 lines   19

Our tests are available on a github repository and synced to the offical TestFest subversion repository.

I think we had a lot of fun, even recruited a couple newbies :-) to the whole testing thing. I want to extend my gratitude once more to everyone (Tim, Moritz, Robin, Falko, Christian, Jan and Florian) who showed up and helped us to improve PHP.

Great effort!

German content: These are my slides from the BEPHPUG user group meeting (2009/05/06). I hope these help others to get an overview on testing with PHP and PHP itself. I certainly hope it's all correct too! :-)