As magento owner, developer or sysadmin you maybe know some performance bottlenecks and how to tweak your server for getting a better performance. In this article we like to show you the benefits of using HHVM for magento.
Magento needs a lot hardware recourse to perform well. Even if you have installed some additional third party extension, a large product catalog with many SKU´s or a higher traffic you reach the limits. Of course you can scale up your system by setting up a multi server environment, but this is expensive and takes a lot knowledge about how to configure every detail correct.
Facebook has developed HHVM from very similar reasons, more performance by using less hardware infrastructure. Instead of executing PHP code in high-level bytecode, HHVM translates the PHP code into x64 machine code which is around 40-50% faster!
What is HHVM?
HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in PHP. It uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development flexibility that PHP provides.
How to setup HHVM for magento?
With the blog article of Allan MacGregor you can find a very good description about how to setup HHVM. If you are not an expert or your don´t want to become a developer/ sysadmin you can also find a offer by
MGT-COMMERCE where HHVM is included.
For more information please visit our hosting offer: Magento Hosting
What are the known problems by using HHVM and Magento?
The most common issues are:
- Some third party extensions are not compatible to HHVM.
- HHVM is not compatible to ioncube decoded extensions. ( We do not recommend to use extensions decoded with ioncube at all, because ioncube breaks down the performance a lot! )
HHVM Magento benchmark
We have used a Magento 1.8.1 with sample data and our high performance stack Enterprise ( HHVM included ) vs high performance stack php-fpm.
Summary
HHVM is a big step forward to reach a maximum on magento performance!
By using HHVM you can handle more traffic on the same server or you can reduce the server resources up to 50%. Facebook mainly developed HHVM to reduce the cost of their hardware infrastructure and to get a better performance.
In our benchmarks we have reached a 45-50% better magento performance!
Using HHVM for magento makes sense for all performance enthusiast and for shop owners how like to save a lot money on hosting side.
Install and configure HHVM for magento is complex and you need some deep skills as sysadmin! If you like to get a well configured server stack with HHVM, please take a look at our „Enterprise“ offer: Magento Hosting