Way of the Future

With the performance gains promised by HHVM and PHP 7, WordPress site admins are living in pretty exciting times. The PHP world at large is in a proverbial space race, and every WordPress site will (eventually) benefit. But early adopters and folks who manage their own servers shouldn’t be the only ones who get early access to these face melting bumps in speed. In this talk, I’ll be introducing you to things you can do to get your code ready for these next generation hosting environments.

Transcript

2. I'm Jason Cosper I work at WP Engine
3. I created Hipster Ipsum I organize the Bakersfield WordPress Meetup I maintain the Force Strong Passwords plugin
4. @boogah
5. When I gave this talk five months ago...
6. I was pushing HHVM Hard
7. The numbers were compelling 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
8. PHP adoption rates were depressing • PHP 5.3 — 41.4% • Released: June 30, 2009 • End of Life: August 14, 2014 • PHP 5.4 — 30.1% • Released: March 1, 2012 • End of Life: September 12, 2015 • PHP 5.5 — 9.3% • Released: June 20, 2013 • End of Life: June 20, 2016 • PHP 5.6 — 1.5% • Released: August 28, 2014 • End of Life: August 28, 2017
9. And hosts were announcing HHVM support • WP Engine • DreamHost • Pagely • SiteGround • Kinsta • Etc.
10. Legacy PHP bad
11. But I was being myopic
12. Don't get me wrong HHVM is still fast
14. But PHP is PHP
15. PHP 7 is PHP on steroids
16. Let's take a look at some numbers boogah.org/55vs7
17. PHP 5.5 vs. PHP 7 • WordPress (4.3.1) • PHP 7 was 2.6 times faster than PHP 5.5 • WordPress (4.3.1) + WooCommerce (2.4.8) • PHP 7 was 1.4 times faster than PHP 5.5 • WordPress (4.3.1) + bbPress (2.5.8) • PHP 7 was 6.6 times faster than PHP 5.5 • WordPress (4.3.1) + BuddyPress (2.3.4) • PHP 7 was 4.7 times faster than PHP 5.5
18. All these numbers are pretty awesome
19. However, 67.9% of all PHP sites are currently powered by versions that should be considered dead
20. They have ceased to be
21. Why should anyone give a !?
22. Nobody builds sites for the past You build them for the future
23. The futch
24. vagrantup.com
25. Vagrant creates & configures virtual development environments
26. This means less yak shaving & more working
27. Varying Vagrant Vagrants is the industry standard for WordPress development
28. There is another
29. It does PHP 7 & HHVM And it was made for WordPress development
30. HGV github.com/wpengine/hgv
31. Built by WP Engine for our Mercury platform
32. No matter where you host your site, you can use HGV to test your code
33. HGV • Built with members of the 10up team • Work on your code under PHP 5.5, PHP 7 & HHVM at the same time • Provision multiple sites using YML files • Debugging & benchmarking tools • Xdebug • XHProf • Siege • query-monitor • debug-objects • debug-bar
34. Installing HGV is easyish
35. Prerequisites • Git • VirtualBox or VMware • Vagrant • The Vagrant Ghost plugin boogah.org/hgv-prereq 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-ghost
36. Install cd ~ mkdir vagrant cd vagrant git clone --recursive https://github.com/wpengine/hgv.git cd hgv vagrant up
37. While HGV installs, make yourself a drink It should only take about 30 minutes
38. Get to work • Local file access • Use your favorite text editor! • [HGV_dir]/hgv_data/sites/[sitename]/ • [HGV_dir]/hgv_data/sites/[sitename]/wp-content/[plugins|themes]/ • SSH • vagrant ssh • phpMyAdmin • admin.hgv.test/phpmyadmin/
39. Just import your site and see what breaks
40. PHP 7 & WordPress boogah.org/php7wp
41. Switching your environment is a piece of cake
42. Force your site to PHP 7 vagrant ssh sudo nano -w /etc/nginx/conf.d/www-[sitename].conf
43. Force your site to PHP 7 Change this: cache.php.example.test php; php.example.test php; To this: cache.php.example.test php7; php.example.test php7; Save your changes!
44. Force your site to PHP 7 service nginx restart
45. Questions?