Don't walk, RUN if you can to HHVM. Like you, I was running on amazon. Sure PHP runs at scale but then you have to load-balance. But come on, we had 20 servers at a cost of ~$6k a month. Thats just for the front-end also.
In August, I switched to HHVM and I was able to shrink down to a single server. Now I'm running 3 for things like redundancy. My bill? Around $1500 a month, big difference. No wonder Etsy, Wikipedia, Baidu and others have switched over.
Not only this, but 3.8 is coming with increased performance over 7. Not only RPS but also latency as well. I run an ad server and the latency DROP was huge compared to PHP.
Oh and for the backend application. Moving to HHVM it definitely feels much snappier than PHP. In some cases, you can see the difference. I don't regret moving to HHVM. Very very doubtful I'd move back to PHP 7.
My only 2 complaints are that Postgres and zeroMQ drivers are 3rd party extensions. There is talk of Postgres coming in house. I just wish more people could petition for ZeroMQ to be included.
If you do go to HHVM. Maybe it may be worth moving from Laravel to Slim (3)? You may get a boost due to the lower framework size? I know I did when going from Codeigniter to Slim 2.
We ran some experiments with HHVM last year. Unfortunately, some random library that has a random dependency was failing on HHVM. The surface area for this type of incompatibility is a bit too much for me to bear.
PHP once had its place to make .html files dynamic. Unfortunately, the ease of making this happen accidentally turned PHP into what it is today. Beyond this, there isn't much merit to the language, the frameworks, or the ecosystem at all.
We're certainly running. But rather than stopping at HHVM, we're dropping PHP altogether.
Comments
Don't walk, RUN if you can to HHVM. Like you, I was running on amazon. Sure PHP runs at scale but then you have to load-balance. But come on, we had 20 servers at a cost of ~$6k a month. Thats just for the front-end also.
In August, I switched to HHVM and I was able to shrink down to a single server. Now I'm running 3 for things like redundancy. My bill? Around $1500 a month, big difference. No wonder Etsy, Wikipedia, Baidu and others have switched over.
Not only this, but 3.8 is coming with increased performance over 7. Not only RPS but also latency as well. I run an ad server and the latency DROP was huge compared to PHP.
Oh and for the backend application. Moving to HHVM it definitely feels much snappier than PHP. In some cases, you can see the difference. I don't regret moving to HHVM. Very very doubtful I'd move back to PHP 7.
My only 2 complaints are that Postgres and zeroMQ drivers are 3rd party extensions. There is talk of Postgres coming in house. I just wish more people could petition for ZeroMQ to be included.
If you do go to HHVM. Maybe it may be worth moving from Laravel to Slim (3)? You may get a boost due to the lower framework size? I know I did when going from Codeigniter to Slim 2.
We ran some experiments with HHVM last year. Unfortunately, some random library that has a random dependency was failing on HHVM. The surface area for this type of incompatibility is a bit too much for me to bear.
PHP once had its place to make .html files dynamic. Unfortunately, the ease of making this happen accidentally turned PHP into what it is today. Beyond this, there isn't much merit to the language, the frameworks, or the ecosystem at all.
We're certainly running. But rather than stopping at HHVM, we're dropping PHP altogether.
Have you looked at hhvm recently? A lot has changed since then and things have gotten better.
Although like you, I am eyeing golang as well. But not got any work scheduled until the latter part of this year.