Wikimedia Platform Engineering/Site performance and architecture/status

Last update on: 2012-07-monthly

2012-06-29
An initial investigation has begun on the possibility of upgrading from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4. Benchmarks are very promising, but a security enhancement we currently using with PHP 5.3 (Suhosin) is not yet available for PHP 5.4, so the team is debating whether to carry on without it, as well as estimating the performance penalty introduced by this patch. More improvements have been made to Ganglia and Graphite.

2012-06-monthly
An initial investigation has begun on the possibility of upgrading from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4. Benchmarks are very promising, but a security enhancement we are currently using with PHP 5.3 (Suhosin) is not yet available for PHP 5.4, so the team is debating whether to carry on without it, as well as estimating the performance penalty introduced by this patch. More improvements have been made to Ganglia and Graphite.

2012-07-monthly
Tim Starling investigated of llvm PHP bytecode converter this month, which looked like a promising direction for performance optimization. The theoretical gain was pretty significant, but actual performance has be disappointing and we probably won't go in that direction.