Duty Now for the Future

WordPress developers have been refining their development workflows and toolkits for 12 years now. As game changing server technologies like Facebook's HHVM start to creep into the WordPress hosting space — WP Engine, Pagely & Kinsta all offer HHVM-ready plans — those workflows need to be expanded.

I'll be introducing you to a new Vagrant-based WordPress development environment (HGV) that includes debugging and profiling tools and allows you to test your code in both PHP & HHVM environments.

In order to follow along, a passing familiarity with the command line helps, but isn't a hard requirement.

Transcript

1. Duty Now for the Future
   

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2. In the past this information has been suppressed
   but now it can be told
   

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3. We're all Devo
   

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4. We're all Devs
   

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5. Let's look to the future
   

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6. The futch
   

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7. PHP 7
   

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8. PHP 7 Beta
   June 2015
   

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9. PHP 7 Release
   November 2015
   (Probably)
   

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10. There's a PHP 7 Vagrant
    

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11. Vagrant is a tool for building
    complete development
    environments. With an easy-to-use
    workflow and focus on automation,
    Vagrant lowers development
    environment setup time, increases
    development/production parity,
    and makes the "works on my
    machine" excuse a relic of the past.
    — About Vagrant
    

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12. Caveat
    

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13. PHP version adoption stinks
    (Especially at the host level)
    

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14. Let's look at PHP 5 adoption
    

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15. The Majority 1
    • PHP 5.3 — 41.4%
    • Release Date: June 30, 2009
    • End of Life: August 14, 2014
    • PHP 5.4 — 30.1%
    • Release Date: March 1, 2012
    • End of Life: September 12, 2015
    1 Numbers from w3Techs as of June 2, 2015.
    

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16. Let that sink in...
    

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17. 71.5% of all PHP sites
    are powered by versions
    that will be dead
    by the end of Summer 2015
    

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18. Legacy PHP bad
    

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19. The Minority 1
    • PHP 5.5 — 9.3%
    • Release date: June 20, 2013
    • End of Life: June 20, 2016
    • PHP 5.6 — 1.5%
    • Release Date: August 28, 2014
    • End of Life: August 28, 2017
    1 Numbers from w3Techs as of June 2, 2015.
    

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20. PHP 5.5 will be
    End of Life'd
    by this time next year
    

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21. How long will it be
    until enough hosts support PHP 7?
    

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22. How long can we wait?
    

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23. There is another
    

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24. HHVM
    

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25. How is HHVM better?
    HHVM compiles PHP to an intermediate bytecode. The
    bytecode then gets translated to machine code by a just-in-
    time (JIT) compiler. Doing this removes the usual interpreted
    execution bottlenecks that come with using native PHP.
    On top of that, HHVM analyzes your code as it
    runs. After it collects enough data, HHVM
    performs optimizations on what it considers to be
    frequently invoked and expensive pieces of code.
    TL;DR: It's fast. And smart.
    

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26. But how much faster?
    WordPress 4.1.x with 20 concurrent users.
    • Requests per second
    • PHP 5.5: 256
    • PHP 7: 627
    • HHVM 3.7: 666
    • Latency
    • PHP 5.5: 78 milliseconds
    • PHP 7: 32 milliseconds
    • HHVM 3.7: 30 milliseconds
    

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27. So what's the catch?
    • The HHVM compiler is strict.
    • If you're using poorly written code, things
    can go sideways. Fast.
    • The occasional memory leak.
    • Long running PHP processes can chew up
    tons of RAM.
    • Scheduled restarts of HHVM processes are
    not uncommon.
    

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28. But don't let that scare you
    There are large companies already using HHVM
    in production
    • Facebook
    • Wikipedia
    • Etsy
    • Box
    

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29. HHVM-ready Hosts
    • WP Engine
    • DreamHost
    • Pagely
    • SiteGround
    • Kinsta
    

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30. There's an HHVM Vagrant
    And it's made for WordPress development
    

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31. HGV
    https://github.com/wpengine/hgv
    

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32. Built by WP Engine
    for our Mercury platform
    

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33. No matter where you host your site,
    you can use HGV to test your code
    

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34. HGV
    • Built with members of the 10up team
    • Work on your code under PHP 5.5 & HHVM at the same time
    • Debugging & benchmarking tools
    • Xdebug
    • XHProf
    • Siege
    • query-monitor
    • debug-objects
    • debug-bar
    

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35. Installing HGV is easyish
    

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36. Prerequisites
    • Git
    • VirtualBox or VMware
    • Vagrant
    • The Vagrant::Hostsupdater plugin
    https://goo.gl/KpA928
    ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
    brew install git
    brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
    brew cask install vagrant
    brew cask install virtualbox
    vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
    

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37. Install
    git clone --recursive https://github.com/wpengine/hgv.git
    cd hgv
    vagrant up
    

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38. While HGV installs, make yourself a drink
    It should only take about 30 minutes
    

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39. Get to work
    • Local file access
    • Use your favorite text editor!
    • [HGV_dir]/hgv_data/sites/[hhvm|php]/
    • [HGV_dir]/hgv_data/sites/[hhvm|php]/wp-content/
    [plugins|themes]/
    • SSH
    • vagrant ssh
    • phpMyAdmin
    • admin.hgv.dev/phpmyadmin/
    

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40. Coming Soon in HGV 1.3
    • One Vagrant to rule them all
    • Configure multiple installs & domains
    • Adds the domains to your hosts file
    • Provisioned via a YML file
    ---
    enviro: trunk
    hhvm_domains:
    - hhvm.trunk.hgv.dev
    php_domains:
    - trunk.hgv.dev
    

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41. So we've got that goin' for us,
    which is nice
    

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42. Questions?
    

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43. It's time to go beyond the normal thing.
    It's time to do the super thing.
    Follow @boogah on Twitter.
    

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