My apologies to Ron Burgundy for the title of the post, but I’m just a fan of the wisest man to ever live.
As Marco and Illia and countless others have said, unless you don’t work with PHP or were in a coma, Facebook released
HipHop for PHP , it’s open source, it’s awesome, it makes you go fast.
It’s not for you.
You, being the average PHP developer, systems administrator, hacker. A lot is being made of how CPU load went down by 50% etc, that’s a great number and on the surface very hard to argue with, but to really understand it, you must understand the problem a lot better. Facebook didn’t decide to write HipHop and use it in production because they had all this money laying around and felt like paying 3 engineers to work on something. They looked at other existing alternatives, implemented them, and when they maxed them out, decided to switch.
HipHop Does Not:
- Make your database queries faster. A slow database is slow whether accessed via PHP or C++, Java, Scala, Ruby…..
- Make your images load faster
- Debug faster / better, if anything you’ll be debugging HipHop and PHP , to make sure something didn’t break in the conversion.
I really want people to understand, that the decision to switch to HipHop isn’t a light decision, and it’s definitely not the silver bullet.
If anything, HipHop should be your last resort.
But, it’ll help me reduce the number of web heads!
It’ll also make you change your deployment process, you’ll have to learn how to use gdb and other tools to debug things in production.
Keep that in mind when you think about the monthly cost of a cloud server, or a slice at slicehost. The number of servers arguments comes into play when you can eliminate > 100 servers.
If you’re going from 4 servers to 2, I guarantee you that you’re doing it wrong.
I suggest you to look into your application more, and find the bottlenecks. Be absolutely certain that you can’t tweak your DB any more, or use APC, or Zend Server or something else.
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN