The PHP 7 Features and Magento Performance

The fan of magento can prepare a party soon with this information about new version of PHP 7 release. PHP 7 with the first focus for performance what is tested and check to run well for Zend Framework (the framework magento base on). This is not mean magento will work fast like Zend but nearly or even faster hopefully.

Now let ‘s go through 5 nice features of PHP 7

1. Huge Performance Improvements

This is the most feature all of PHP fan are waiting for and the most important to make the PHP world more popular. As a fan of PHP and a fan of magento, I am very happy to hear this. Just can’t wait to test the result.

Zeev Suraski of Zend has written an article on which he openly admits that they take HHVM as a competitor of (the Zend Engine based) PHP. This just confirms that the release of HHVM and then Facebook Hack triggered this great interest of Zend to continue to provide the leading implementation of PHP.

On that article he also demonstrates how far PHPNG branch (PHP 7) has evolved in terms of performance improvements. Check it here http://zsuraski.blogspot.com.br/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng.html

2. JIT Engine

According to Dmitry Stogov of Zend, the development of PHPNG was started with the motivation to research the implementation of a JIT engine for the Zend Engine based PHP.

A JIT engine can dynamically compile Zend opcodes into native machine code that eventually would make the code run faster next time it is run.

3. AST: Abstract Syntax Tree

Recently Nikita Popov proposed the implementation of the generation of an Abstract Syntax Tree as an intermediary step for the PHP compilation process.
It is not the first time Nikita proposes the implementation of an AST compilation step. He already proposed it in 2012.
Nikita already provided a patch to implement AST support on top of the PHPNG branch.

4. Asynchronous Programming

Despite the initial effort of Jean Pauli, it does not mean that asynchronous programming built-in support will be enabled in PHP 7.

However, since Facebook Hack already provides asynchronous programming support in a very elegant way, I would not be surprised if PHP core developers moved faster to make asynchronous programming in PHP available sooner rather than later.

5. Standalone Multi-threading Web Server

This is something that does not seem to be in the plans for PHP 7 but it is something that would make PHP more scalable.

PHP can already be run from multi-threaded Web servers like ngynx, lighttpd or even Apache in worker mode, however that is not the same as having PHP run on its own multi-threading Web server.

A multi-threading Web server can handle many simultaneous requests using a single memory pool, thus avoiding the memory waste that happens when you run PHP as FastCGI or in Apache pre-fork mode.

It would also allow PHP use a single pool of database connections, thus minimizing the number of simultaneous database connections opened during access peaks.

HHVM can already be run as a standalone multi-threading Web server since the days when the project was called HipHop PHP compiler.

This allowed Facebook to reduce bit of server machines needed to handle the high load of accesses that they have.

Despite running PHP as a standalone multi-threading Web server is not yet in the plans for PHP 7, it is certainly something good to have, at least for PHP 8.

When will be the PHP 7 Release Date?

It is too early to have a good estimate of the release date of PHP 7. Different people estimate it will take between 1 to 3 years. A reasonable guess is to expect a final PHP 7 release some time in 2016, although it is not impossible to see early alpha versions still in 2015.

So, for now you can count with at least 1 year of waiting until can start trying PHP 7.

Well, it ‘s too many information about PHP 7 but I believe all of things I can do now is waiting and enjoy the new PHP 7 with Magento Performance.